Sublime text is an amazing text editor. Sleek, full of features, multi platform, very usable without a mouse. It is my editor of choice since a few years already.
One of its great advantages is that it is extensible in python, which makes it very easy to tweak.
I recently played with a vagrant box in which I needed to update a file. The file was mounted inside vagrant, but needed to be copied elsewhere inside the box, meaning it had to be copied manually every time I saved it. As I am very lazy (laziness drives progress, one of the favorite saying of my director of studies) I wanted to do that automagically. This is a very simple job, ideal for a first plugin.
So, where to start? Well, it is quite easy: on the menu bar click tools, then new plugin, Et voilà, you have your first plugin. Congratulations!
import sublime, sublime_plugin class ExampleCommand(sublime_plugin.TextCommand): def run(self, edit): self.view.insert(edit, 0, "Hello, World")
This is a nice skeleton, but it does no go very far.
As I want to have an action on save, I needed to have an event listener plugin, in my case listening to a save event. I wanted to act after the event (use the file only after it was written). The API says that on_post_save_async is the best event for me, as it runs in a separate thread and is non blocking.
import sublime
import sublime_plugin
class UpdateOnSave(sublime_plugin.EventListener):
def on_post_save_async(self, view):
filename = view.file_name()
# do something with the filename
Good, this is getting somewhere! All the base is present, now I just had to do something with this file.
The something is that case was a kind of subprocess call, to use vagrant ssh. Sublime already has a wrapper around subprocess, named exec. Exec can run in 2 contexts, view (basically the sublime buffer you are editing) to run TextCommands or window (sublime itself) to run all type of commands. Finding in which context to run your command is a bit of trial and error, but once done the last bit of the plugin is thus a trivial (once you know it) call to exec:
# please always use shlex with subprocess
import shlex
import sublime
import sublime_plugin
import os
class UpdateOnSave(sublime_plugin.EventListener):
def on_post_save_async(self, view):
filename = view.file_name()
savedfile = os.path.basename(filename)
saveddir = os.path.dirname(filename)
# write in sublime status buffer
sublime.status_message('Manually saving ' + filename)
source_in_vagrant = '/vagrant/' + savedfile
dest_in_vagrant = '/project/' + savedfile
cmd_cp = "vagrant ssh -c 'sudo cp {0} {1}'".format(source, dest)
view.window().run_command('exec', {
'cmd': shlex.split(cmd_cp),
'working_dir': saveddir,
}
)
Good, your plugin is ready! The last question is to know where to put it to have it actually used. With Sublime 3 under Linux, you need to have it in $HOME/.config/sublime-text-3/Packages/User. Note that it must be named something.py, with the .py extension, not the .py3 extension, or it would not be found.
You can find the plugin on github.
This Data Guy 