HOW TO INSTALL SUBLIME TEXT 2 ON UBUNTU 12.04 (UNITY)

Sublime Text is an awesome text editor. If you’ve never heard of it, you shouldcheck it out right now.

I’ve made this tutorial because there’s no installer for the Linux versions of Sublime Text. While that’s not a real problem, I feel there is a cleaner way to go around this. Also, this post will show you how to integrate Sublime Text to Unity (which, I’m glad to report, has now matured into a fully functional user interface). So let’s get on with this. Here is my how to install Sublime Text on Ubuntu tutorial.

[This tutorial has been updated following feedback from AskUbuntu. Also, you need to do these steps using your login. Do not start by typing "sudo -s"!]

STEP 1

Download the tarfile that suits you best and extract it. Here’s the command to extract tar.bz2 files:

tar xf Sublime\ Text\ 2.0.1\ x64.tar.bz2

You’ll notice that I got the 64-bit version. The reason is that it’s lightning fast. So, go for that if you can!

STEP 2

You’ll get a “Sublime Text 2″ folder after extraction. This folder contains all the files that Sublime Text will need. So we have to move that folder somewhere more appropriate. Like the “/opt/” folder :

sudo mv Sublime\ Text\ 2 /opt/

STEP 3

At some point you’d want to be able to call Sublime Text from the Terminal by just typing “sublime”. To do that, we’ll just create a symbolic link in “/usr/bin” like thus:

sudo ln -s /opt/Sublime\ Text\ 2/sublime_text /usr/bin/sublime

STEP 4

Now that our files are at the right place, we need to create a launcher in Unity. To do this, we’re going to create a .desktop file in “/usr/share/applications”:

sudo sublime /usr/share/applications/sublime.desktop

And paste the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Sublime Text 2
# Only KDE 4 seems to use GenericName, so we reuse the KDE strings.
# From Ubuntu's language-pack-kde-XX-base packages, version 9.04-20090413.
GenericName=Text Editor

Exec=sublime
Terminal=false
Icon=/opt/Sublime Text 2/Icon/48x48/sublime_text.png
Type=Application
Categories=TextEditor;IDE;Development
X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=NewWindow

[NewWindow Shortcut Group]
Name=New Window
Exec=sublime -n
TargetEnvironment=Unity

As you can see, these lines are quite straightforward. Go ahead and experiment a bit with them.

STEP 5

Now you would probably want to open all text files with Sublime Text 2. The easiest way to do that is to open up the file associations list:

sudo sublime /usr/share/applications/defaults.list

And replace all occurrences of gedit.desktop with sublime.desktop. Tada ! There you go. You now have Sublime Text 2 installed on Unity on Ubuntu 12.04, like a pro. Here are some screenshots: