Sublime Text Knowledge Base

Contents:

How to Solve Nearly Every Problem

Problem Description

Sublime Text behaves unexpectedly after one of these events:

• Installing new packages
• Updating existing packages
• Upgrading to a newer version of Sublime Text
• Editing settings files

Many features that were working fine up to now have stopped working, etc.

Solution

It’s unlikely that your problem is due to bugs in Sublime Text. Revert Sublime Text to a freshly-installed state and verify whether the problem persists. If the issues you were finding go away, some of your packages or settings files must be the cause.

In the official documentation you can learn how to revert Sublime Text to a default state.

Help. The interface is broken.

Problem Description

Tabs are overlapping. Text is distorted. The sidebar is broken. Colors are wrong. What happened?

Solution

Sublime Text’s interface is completely customizable. Everything is controlled through a sublime-theme file. A fresh copy of Sublime Text comes with a file called Default.sublime-theme located in the User directory (Preferences > Browse Packages); however, you may find yourself installing user-made theme files down the road.

So how does this tie in to the problem? Something is wrong with either your theme file or your preferences files.

• Check your preferences file (Preferences > Settings - Default or Preferences > Settings - User). To make sure that your theme is set, look for the following::

  “theme”: “Default.sublime-theme”

Check to see there is a missing comma, incorrect spelling, or syntax issue. Remember, every parameter in the Preferences file needs a comma at the end (excluding the last one). * If there is nothing wrong with the preferences file, then the problem lies in the theme-file. Your best option to restore the theme file is to do a fresh install (Revert Instructions) All is not lost though. If you simply take the new fresh Theme - Default file and copy it back into your Packages directory, you should be able to continue your coding endeavors right where you left off.

Key Bindings Have Stopped Working or Behave Unexpectedly

Problem Description

Key bindings have stopped working. Keyboard shortcuts that used to work before don’t do anything now or behave unexpectedly.

Solution

All keyboard shortcuts are customizable in Sublime Text. If you’ve experienced this problem, it’s likely that you or a package you’ve installed has overriden the key binding in question.

To see which command a key binding triggers, type the following into the Python console (Ctrl + `) and press enter:

sublime.log_commands(True)

Now debugging information will be printed to the console every time you press a key combination bound to a command.