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Fixing Sublime Text When Things Go Bad

I’m not sure what I did but I managed to disable the sidebar in Sublime (or at least I initially thought that’s what happened, keep reading).

Hitting the menu wouldn’t turn it on, nor would the keyboard shortcut work.

Uh oh.

Since I knew Sublime stores all it’s settings in text files I went looking and discovered:

C:\Users\jdpriest\AppData\Roaming\Sublime Text 2\Settings\Session.sublime_session

And it contained a bunch of useful looking settings like:

{% codeblock lang:json %} { “menu_visible”: true, “show_minimap”: false, “show_open_files”: false, “show_tabs”: false, “side_bar_visible”: false, “status_bar_visible”: false }

I tinkered with a few of those and restarted Sublime. Still no sidebar. Getting a bit desperate I deleted the file thinking Sublime would rebuild it when it starts up again with defaults.

Nope. I restarted Sublime and there was no new sublime_session file.

Hmmm.

I really didn’t want to reinstall everything at work so I started tinkering around with my Sublime install at home.

Then I noticed you don’t have a sidebar until you create/open a project!

I created a project and I got a new session file. Ah-ha!

I’m still a bit unclear how projects work in Sublime. I’ve simply been opening my code directory in Sublime. Adding the directory, Sublime prompted me to create a project file (I didn’t pay much attention to this step when I first got started). This time I took note and it created two files:

  • Z:\mycodedir\myproject.sublime-workspace
  • Z:\mycodedir\myproject.sublime-project

Somewhere along the line my original sublime-workspace files got deleted!

The sublime-project files seems to simply contain the path to your project. I’m guessing you can define multiple paths:

{% codeblock lang:json %} “folders”: [{ “path”: “/Z/myproject” }]

Opening the sublime-workspace file it appears similar to your session settings file, it looks like you can configure things at the project level.

For example in Project A you could show the minimap, in Project B you could hide it.

{% codeblock lang:json %} { “menu_visible”: true, “show_minimap”: false, “show_open_files”: false, “show_tabs”: false, “side_bar_visible”: false, “status_bar_visible”: false }

I will definitely be looking more into how projects work in Sublime, and hopefully this will help others if your Sublime suddenly starts acting weird.