Installing Sublime Text

00:00 Okay! So, the first step will be to install Sublime Text 3 on a fresh install of Ubuntu. So in this case, I’m using Ubuntu Linux 16.04, which is generally a great choice if you’re starting out with this.

00:14 It’s based on a Debian distribution, so you should be able to adapt most of these steps no problem to whatever other Linux distribution you’re using. But obviously, if you’re starting out then I would recommend you just use the same setup because it makes everything a little bit easier and just guarantees that you can follow the steps exactly and you’ll end up with a great setup. Okay, so the first thing we need to do is install Sublime Text 3.

00:42 And you might be wondering, “Should I be using Sublime Text 2 or should I be using Sublime Text 3?” At this point, I would absolutely go with Sublime Text 3. 99% of the plugins have been updated to work with Sublime Text 3 and it’s the version that’s under active development.

01:00 It’s much faster than version 2. So there’s really no good reason to go with Sublime Text 2 at this point. I would definitely recommend you go with 3. And actually, when you go to sublimetext.com to download the installer, this is what they’ll recommend to you.

01:17 So, they’re going to detect your operating system, recommend you the latest version of Sublime Text. And in this case, it’s going to be Sublime Text 3 and the 64-bit version.

01:29 There’s also the 32-bit version, but again, there’s no big reason to go with the 32-bit version unless you’re running this on a 32-bit machine, which I’m assuming you’re not.

01:40 But it shouldn’t really make a big difference. You just want to click that download button, and then it wants to download this Debian package, so we’re just going to save that file and it should download really quickly.

01:53 And then we’re just going to click on the Debian file, and it’s going to bounce us to the Ubuntu software manager. Here we can confirm this is Sublime Text. We want to install this package, so just hit the Install button.

02:07 And now this is going to ask us for our account password to install the software, so I’m just going to enter that. All right, and this should install really quickly and at this point, you can close all of this other stuff.

02:18 And now let’s actually launch Sublime Text for the first time. Usually if you’re on Ubuntu, the easiest way to do that is to just go through the search and you just want to type in Sublime and it should already pop up.

02:32 And then it’s just going to boot right up. And one thing I like to do is to actually pin this to the launcher so we have this icon here and we can start it again easily.

02:43 At this point, we have Sublime Text installed successfully. There’s one more step you might want to take here. You can see that this is showing up as an unregistered version, which means that we’re going to get a nag screen every time we save a file.

02:56 If you have a license, you can go to Help > Enter License, and then this is where you would copy and paste your license key once you’ve purchased one at sublimetext.com/buy.

03:08 I’m just going to do that real quick so we’re working with an actual registered version and then I’ll be right back with you. All right, there we go! So I registered my copy of Sublime Text.

03:19 At this point, we have a basic version of Sublime Text 3 installed. Now, there’s one more step we need to take, because some of the most powerful features for Python development with Sublime Text—they’re actually contained in Sublime Text plugins or they’re also called Sublime Text packages.

03:35 And we need to install those separately, and now one way to do that would be to actually go in and copy the stuff in manually into the right folders, but there’s sort of a meta-plugin or a plugin manager for Sublime Text called Package Control.

03:52 This makes it a lot easier to install other plugins. So really, the only plugin we need to install manually is Package Control, and after that, we can just use Package Control to install all of the other packages and plugins that we need.

04:07 Luckily, in the latest version of Sublime Text, it’s actually really easy to install Package Control because it’s no longer a super manual process. Instead, we just need to go to Tools in the menu here and then click on Install Package Control. And this is it, right? At this point, we have Package Control installed and we’ve got this new Install Package command in the Command Palette.

04:32 What this new command adds is the ability to install additional plugins directly from within Sublime Text. We can verify that this works by opening the so-called Command Palette, and you can either do that by clicking on Tools and clicking on Command Palette—so this guy here’s the Command Palette—or there’s also a shortcut and that is Control + Shift + P, and that’s also going to open up the Command Palette.

04:58 And now the Command Palette is a really useful interface into the internals of Sublime Text. And now that we have the Package Control plugin installed, there’s a new command called Install Package.

05:14 And you can find this just by typing out the name of the command. And it’s smart enough to do fuzzy matching, so if you just go install p or something like that, it’s also going to find that match.

05:28 And then you can select that with the up-down keys or just clicking on commands with the cursor. And now once I hit Return, this is loading all of the available plugins.

05:41 You can see what it’s doing here in the status bar. And now I can search all of the available plugins and actually install them directly through this interface here, right? So for example, this would find the Anaconda plugin, and I could work it through that.

05:57 So really, these are all the setup steps we need to have a basic Sublime Text 3 install, and now we’re actually going to tailor it and make it work really nicely with your Python install.