How to use Sublime Text from the command line

By Dan Bader — Get free updates of new posts here.

Sublime Text comes with a handy command line tool (“subl”) that lets you control Sublime Text from the terminal. In this 3 minute screencast I’ll show you how to setup the command and what you can do with it.

Commands demonstrated in the video:

# Open a blank Sublime Text window
$ subl

# Open an existing file
$ subl my-file.txt

# Create a new file
$ subl a-new-file.txt

# Make "subl" accessible from the command line
ln -s "/Applications/Sublime Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl" /usr/local/bin/subl

This article was filed under: productivity, programming, sublimetext, and video.

Related Articles:

Using Sublime Text as your Git editor – A quick screencast that shows you how to use Sublime Text as your Git editor. Super useful if you work with Git from the command line!
Click & jump to any file or folder from the terminal – iTerm2 for macOS has a little known feature that lets you open files and folders simply by Cmd+Clicking on them in the terminal. Among other things, this is super handy for debugging tests.
Setting up Sublime Text for Python development – I recently started using Sublime Text 2 more and more as my main editor for Python development. This article explains my setup and some tweaks that make Python programmers happy.
Sublime Text plugin review: GitGutter – Let’s take a look at GitGutter, a Sublime Text 2/3 plugin that highlights lines modified since the latest Git commit.
A better Python REPL: bpython vs python – A quick video that demonstrates bpython, an awesome alternative Python interpreter.

Latest Articles:

Interfacing Python and C: The CFFI Module – How to use Python’s built-in CFFI module for interfacing Python with native libraries as an alternative to the “ctypes” approach.
Write More Pythonic Code by Applying the Things You Already Know – There’s a mistake I frequently make when I learn new things about Python… Here’s how you can avoid this pitfall and learn something about Python’s “enumerate()” function at the same time.
Working With File I/O in Python – Learn the basics of working with files in Python. How to read from files, how to write data to them, what file seeks are, and why files should be closed.
How to Reverse a String in Python – An overview of the three main ways to reverse a Python string: “slicing”, reverse iteration, and the classic in-place reversal algorithm. Also includes performance benchmarks.
Mastering Click: Writing Advanced Python Command-Line Apps – How to improve your existing Click Python CLIs with advanced features like sub-commands, user input, parameter types, contexts, and more.
Working with Random Numbers in Python – An overview for working with randomness in Python, using only functionality built into the standard library and CPython itself.

← Browse All Articles

5 Sublime Text Tweaks to Boost Your Python Productivity