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Syncing Sublime Text 2 Settings via Dropbox

I just recently purchased Sublime Text 2 and thought I would do some digging into syncing the config files via Dropbox (affiliate link). There’s no real way of changing where Sublime looks for it’s file, but we can skirt this issue using symlinks. I run Sublime on Mac and a Windows machine, so I’ll post directions for both platforms.

Windows

(has been tested on Sublime Text 2 build 2165 on Windows 7)

First, create a folder in your Dropbox path where you’d like to put your Sublime files. I used

{Dropbox Path}/appdata/sublime

You’ll need to find out where Sublime is saving your settings. I found this by clicking on the Browse Packages menu option under Preferences. Here’s what mine looked like:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Sublime Text 2\Packages

Make sure you’ve closed Sublime Text before continuing.

Copy Packages, Installed Packages, and Pristine Packages to the folder you’ve created on Dropbox.

At this point, remove the actual folders from the Sublime path. We’re going to create some symlinks now. Open a CMD window with administrator rights and navigate to the the above folder location and run the following:

mklink /D "Installed Packages" "C:\path\to\Dropbox\appdata\sublime\Installed Packages"
mklink /D "Packages" "C:\path\to\Dropbox\apps\sublime\Packages" 
mklink /D "Pristine Packages" "C:\path\to\Dropbox\apps\sublime\Pristine Packages"

You should now be able to fire up Sublime Text which will pull your data from Dropbox.

Mac

Make sure Sublime Text is closed before continuing.

Open up a Terminal window and navigate to the Sublime Text setting folder

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Sublime\ Text 2/

You’ll most likely already have package folders here, so you’ll need to remove them first

rm -r Installed\ Packages
rm -r Packages
rm -r Pristine\ Packages

Now, we’re going to create symlinks to the folders in

~/Dropbox/appdata/sublime/

Run the following commands to create the needed symlinks

ln -s ~/Dropbox/appdata/sublime/Installed\ Packages ./Installed\ Packages
ln -s ~/Dropbox/appdata/sublime/Packages ./Packages
ln -s ~/Dropbox/appdata/sublime/Pristine\ Packages ./Pristine\ Packages

You should now be able to fire up Sublime Text using the settings information present in your Dropbox folder.