Installing Sublime Text

00:00 Welcome to the first lesson. What we’re going to do now is install Sublime Text 3, and I’m doing this on a brand new install of macOS El Capitan.

00:11 You should be able to adapt these steps to previous and upcoming versions of macOS no problem because they’re going to be really similar. The first thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to install Sublime Text 3. So you want to navigate to sublimetext.com and then it should already detect your operating system and suggest the correct version of Sublime Text to you. So you might be wondering, “Should I go with the Sublime Text 2 or should I go with Sublime Text 3?” In my opinion, at this point in time, there’s really no reason to go with Sublime Text 2.

00:41 You’ll want to go with Sublime Text 3. It’s the version thats being updated and where they’re actively working on it to make it better. It’s much more performant than Sublime Text 2 and it has a couple of new features that weren’t available in Sublime Text 2.

00:55 And even the main developer of Sublime Text, he says that you should go with Sublime Text 3. So there isn’t really a good reason to go with Sublime Text 2 these days, and that’s why I would just recommend you go with the default, and that is Sublime Text 3.

01:10 All right, so let’s click that download button here. And just wait for that to finish real quick. Okay, great, the download finished! We’re going to open that DMG file.

01:22 It’s going to do a quick check on the file. And once that opens up, all we need to do is drag the Sublime Text icon to the Applications folder.

01:30 All right, and once that’s done, we can actually click through to that folder

01:36 and click the Sublime Text button. Or, of course, you can always also use Spotlight to launch these apps. All right, so in this case, I’m just going to close Spotlight again, launch Sublime Text, and now we can get rid of all of that stuff. And once it launched… Okay, we’re going to do a quick verification. Yep, we want to open that file. We downloaded from the right place. Okay!

01:59 And usually the first thing you want to do is just pin that to the dock so you can easily relaunch it again. Here in the upper right-hand portion of the window, you can see that we’re using an unregistered version of Sublime Text.

02:11 If you already have a license, you can go to the Help > Enter License menu to activate your copy. If you don’t have a license yet, I highly recommend that you get one because it’s going to get rid of that nag screen that pops up every time you save a file, and this can really destroy your productivity.

02:27 So, I actually worked with someone once and they weren’t going to buy the Sublime Text license and they were getting this nag screen, you know, I’m not kidding you—like probably hundreds of times a day. And it was just so distracting every time I was pair programming with him, it was driving me nuts!

02:42 But he didn’t want to pay the money and he didn’t want to ask his boss to pay the money. So, anyway, I highly recommend you get the Sublime Text license, because it’s going to be very distracting if you’re getting that popup, that purchase warning or purchase now popup all the time. Okay, so I’m just going to activate my copy of Sublime Text real quick.

03:01 Okay, so you can see here I registered my copy and that Unregistered warning up here is gone, and now we’re ready to move on. The first thing we can do is actually get rid of this disk image.

03:12 We don’t need that anymore. And there’s one more step we need to take before we’re ready to dive in into installing Python and getting everything else set up. So with Sublime Text, the really awesome thing about Sublime Text is that it’s very malleable and you can really customize it to your liking and make it really work for you.

03:31 And a lot of this functionality is based on a feature that is now part of Sublime Text, and that is the Package Control plugin. So, Package Control is a plugin for Sublime Text that now actually comes included with Sublime Text.

03:48 And what it allows you to do, it allows you to install other plugins directly through Package Control. So it’s kind of similar to, you know, an operating system package manager—and we’re going to install one of those later on.

03:59 Or if you’ve ever worked on a Linux system where you have the ability to just go and tell the system to install a certain program or a package, and it’s going to figure it out and install all the dependencies automatically.

04:11 Package Control is exactly that for Sublime Text plugins, so it’s going to make our life a lot easier. Before we move on, you want to go to Tools and then click on Install Package Control.

04:24 This is just going to take a second here. And then you get that popup and it tells you Package Control was installed correctly. Now this added a new feature.

04:31 You can access Package Control by going to Tools and then opening the Command Palette. And the Command Palette is kind of an internal control center for Sublime Text, so with this, you can access a bunch of commands that might not be accessible through the regular menu system. And so for Package Control, when you search for Install Package—and this search is actually pretty cool because it’s fuzzy matching, so if I just type package, again, that’s going to find all of the Package Control stuff.

05:01 Or if I just go inst package, that’s also going to match on Install Package. What I want to show you here, though, is the Install Package functionality in Package Control. I’m just going to select that option and then hit Return.

05:13 And it’s going to download all of the repositories and available plugins. And it kind of always tells you what it’s doing down here in the status bar area if you’re wondering. And then you can search for packages. So, for example, later on we’re going to install autocompletion based on the Anaconda plugin, and so if you wanted to install that plugin, you would just type in its name and find the right match and then hit Return or click on that and then trigger the install, and this would install the Anaconda plugin in the background and you could start configuring it and using it right away.

05:45 So, Package Control is going to make our lives a lot easier. And there’s just one more thing I want to show you, because not only can you access this Command Palette here through the Tools menu, you can also use the shortcut and that is by pressing down Command + Shift + P and then you can just type away and find the functionality. Now, one more thing for Package Control.

06:04 Once you have a bunch of packages installed, you can actually also use Package Control commands to disable or enable packages. So if temporarily you don’t want to use, let’s say, Python Autocomplete, you can just disable that package with the Package Control command, and later on re-enable it, and all of your settings and everything else are kind of going to stick with you so you don’t have to fully uninstall this package.

06:29 You can also go in and upgrade packages that way, because often there will be new versions of packages, and then you can just jump to the latest version.

06:36 So, Package Control makes Sublime Text a lot more awesome. It actually makes this whole thing work and makes it so flexible. So you definitely want to learn how this works and just kind of familiarize yourself with that. All right, cool! So, let’s close that menu.

06:50 You can just hit the Escape key and that’s going to close it. And then you can move on to the next lesson, where we’re going to install Python and start integrating Python and Sublime Text.