Open a folder in Sublime Text 3 using command line

Question

Mac Or Linux Only

The best & safest way to do this is to create a symbolic link from the Sublime executable file (subl) to a folder already in your $PATH (e.g. /usr/local/bin/). If you do this; you won’t have to update this every time sublime updates…

For users running BASH (i.e. most people):

ln -s '/Applications/Sublime Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl' /usr/local/bin/subl

If that doesn’t work, create a bin folder in your home directory (if one does not already exist), add it to your PATH variable and create a soft link to that file).

mkdir $HOME/bin
export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
ln -s '/Applications/Sublime Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl' $HOME/bin/subl

Then before you start using it properly, I would suggest taking a look at the help text first, which explains it’s usage:

 subl -h

e.g.

subl my_folder_name/filename.txt
subl my_folder_name

to open a file and folder in Sublime respectively.

Taking it a step further

I use a BASH function to take this a step further with the following benefits:

shorten the shortcut to just s (which is somewhat shorter than subl).
automatically open the current directory that you are if no file/directory is specified after subl / s.

If you want, you can use this function by running the following (after running the above):

cd
subl .bashrc

This should open the .bashrc file in Sublime Text. Add the following to the bottom.

function s {
  if [ "$1" != "" ]; then
    subl $1
  else
    subl $PWD
  fi
}

Then you can open Sublime by simply typing in a s (all the sublime arguments still work)…

(Side Point, I also use a similar function for open (for mac) / or xdg-open (for ubuntu); where I shorten the command to just o. I use it a lot to open the current directory in the file manager)…

Fish Shell Users (you know who you are)

The export line above will not work; so exchange it for the following

set PATH $HOME/bin:$PATH

Before Edit

I had different versions of the command line subl and sublime text three installed. I simply removed the subl command and then re-added and that fixed the problem for me…

For those who may find this useful – this is what I did:

 subl -v

This showed me the build of the command-line sublime, when I checked this against the version of my actual Sublime, I noticed that the command line subl was an older build. So I tried to find the location of the command line subl using the following command (for me this was /usr/bin/subl):

which subl

So I first removed this older command-line sublime text.

sudo rm /usr/bin/subl   (use `sudo` only if necessary)

And then re-added Subl to my PATH (as above)

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