Tuesday, March 6, 2012

SUBLIME TEXT 2 UBUNTU PPA

Category: — SkyHi @ Tuesday, March 06, 2012
Sublime Text 2 is a pretty neat text editor which will remind you of TextMate. It runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OSX and while it's not free, you can evaluate it for an unlimited period of time. Check out our Sublime Text 2 review for more info.

Sublime Text 2 is currently in alpha and there are new builds available for download quote often so I wanted to create an Ubuntu PPA for a while now but I couldn't find out what license it uses. I've emailed the Sublime Text 2 developer and got no reply so I decided to package it like Adobe Flash: the .deb will download Sublime Text 2 from its website so the .deb doesn't come with the actual files.

While Sublime Text 2 automatically checks for updates and prompts you to download the latest version, I like getting the updates through a PPA. Further more, using this PPA, Sublime Text 2 will get a proper .desktop file so you can right click files to open in Sublime Text 2 as well as showing up properly in the Unity launcher. You can also open files from the command line (run "sublime-text-2 /path/to/file" or "subl /path/to/file").


This is the first version of the Sublime Text 2 packaging so there might be bugs. The deb doesn't check if the download was successful; also, it will probably fail to install behind a proxy. Use it at your own risk!


Add the PPA and install Sublime Text 2 in Ubuntu


Before installing, please note that initially, Sublime Text 2 used "~/.Sublime Text 2" for the configuration files while the latest versions use "~/.config/sublime-text-2". Because of a bug with having 2 configuration folders, the deb will remove "~/.Sublime Text 2" so if you have some configuration files you want to keep in there, move them to "~/.config/sublime-text-2".

Add our Sublime Text 2 PPA and install it in Ubuntu using the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-2
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sublime-text-2
I've set up the PPA for personal use but of course, anyone can use it. If you find any bugs, please report them in the comments below.

For what's new in the latest Sublime Text 2 builds, check out its homepage.
Sublime Text 2 Linux

Sublime Text 2 is a TextMate-like text editor currently in alpha which is now available for Linux too (as well as Windows and Mac OSX). The application is not free but its evaluation period does not expire.


Sublime Text 2 comes with a very interesting interface: a sidebar for projects or files and Chrome-style tabs as well as multi-pane editing which includes horizontal, vertical and even a quad pane mode:


Sublime Text 2 double pane


A very interesting feature is "Goto Anything": press Ctrl+P and type something - this will search in both filenames and lines of code across currently open files as well as recently close files. Start your search by using "#" to go to that word line, "@" for symbol or ":" for line:

Sublime Text 2 goto anything


The user interface also comes with a cool minimap which shows you an an overview of your files:

Sublime Text 2 minimap


Other features include macros, various find tools (find in files, find in open files, incremental find), easily switch between project, multiple selection, autocomplete and lots more. And of course, everything is customizable.


Since Sublime Text 2 is currently in alpha, some features are missing. These include distraction free editing, spell checker, bookmarks, a full python API and more - but all these will be coming in the next months.


Download Sublime Text 2 alpha for Linux, Windows and Mac OSX | To run it on Linux, simply extract the downloaded archive and double click the "sublime_text" file.

Update: Sublime Text 2 is now available in a PPA for Ubuntu!


REFERENCES
http://www.webupd8.org/2011/03/sublime-text-2-ubuntu-ppa.html
http://www.webupd8.org/2011/01/sublime-text-2-is-nice-textmade.html
http://www.mylinuxrig.com/post/18755288267/the-linux-setup-noah-lorang-37signals