Working with Sublime CLI

Sublime Text ships with a CLI called subl, but this CLI isn't added to our environment by default. We want to be able to use it straight from our terminal, so we need to add a symbolic link called subl to the subl executable.

ln –s /Applications/Sublime\ Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl /usr/local/bin/subl

To see if it worked, type subl filename in the terminal where filename is the file you want to edit. Did it work? If not, then we need to add our folder that contains the new symlink to the environment. Run the following command:

open ~/.bash_profile

The first line of the file should start with export PATH=. It contains all the directories that will be looked into for executable binaries when we type a command in the terminal. Since we created a symlink to subl inside the /usr/local/bin directory, we will add it to the path by adding it to the directories:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin[…]

Now, run the following code before continuing:

source ~/.bash_profile

This will reload your .bash_profile with the newly added directory.

Sublime CLI should work now; try one of the following commands:

subl filename ("filename" is the filename to edit)
subl foldername ("foldername" is the folder to open)
subl . (to open the current directory)

That's it! We have Sublime Text with CLI running on our OS X!