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Amit DhamuSoftware Engineer
 

Sync Sublime Text Settings With A Cloud Service

4 minute read 00000 views

Sublime Text is a fantastic IDE for coding about anything. The extensive amount of plugins you can install via Package Control is awesome but one thing that has bugged me is the ability to have the same packages I install at work to appear seamlessly on my home computer. This guide will outline how to do just that using a cloud storage service like Dropbox.

There are other guides online about this very same thing but I wanted to make a simple guide mainly to remind myself of the process.

To give a bit of background, I use a Windows 7 machine at work and and an iMac at home. Both have Sublime Text installed. I will show you how to sync your settings for both Windows and Mac. For the purpose of this guide, I will be using Dropbox so ensure you have this installed on your machine. However, the same logic can be applied to other cloud services such as Google Drive or Microsoft SkyDrive.

Step 1 - Create a folder on Dropbox

Go to your Dropbox folder on your computer and create a folder called Sublime Text 2

Step 2 - Copy the Packages folder to the Dropbox folder

On Windows, Go to C:/Users/USERNAME/AppData/Roaming/Sublime Text 2/ or on a Mac, /Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 2/ and copy the Packages folder into the Sublime Text 2 folder you just created on Dropbox.

Step 3 - Backup/Rename original Packages folder

At this stage, I would recommend backing up the original Packages folder by renaming it. I normally just put an underscore in front of the folder name. If you don't want to rename it, move it out of the Sublime Text 2 folder as it will interfere when we want to create our symlink.

Inside your Roaming/Application Support Sublime Text 2 folder, we need to create a symlink for Packages that points to the packages folder we copied over to Dropbox. To do this:

Windows

mklink /D "Packages" "D:\\Dropbox\\Sublime Text 2\\Packages"

** Mac **

ln -s "/Users/USERNAME/Dropbox/Sublime Text 2/Packages" "/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 2/Packages"

This will create the appropriate symlink for whatever platform you are on and make Sublime Text 2 go to your Dropbox for your packages rather than looking locally. This also means that any new packages you install will go straight to your Dropbox.

You may be wondering why I only did this for the Packages folder and not Installed Packages, Pristine Packages, Settings etc. The reason is that the other folders are most of the default settings for Sublime so it isn't really necessary to sync those to the cloud just for the sake of it.

If you do want to sync ALL of the settings (including your licence etc), simply amend this guide and copy the entire Sublime Text 2 folder from Roaming/Application Support to your cloud service. Also remember that you will have to create your symlink inside the Roaming/Application Support folder rather than in the Sublime Text 2 folder.