"subl" command not working properly

Question

I'm running into a problem when using the "subl" command in my terminal. It used to work fine but lately when I run it does open the files I want but I can't edit them and moreover Sublime Text doesn't show up in the topbar of my mac as if it wasn't running at all (there's no dot besides the icon in the dock aswell). I kind of opens it as if it was just a window and not an application...But when I click on the icon from the dock it works just fine !

I've got an old macbook from 2008 running on Lion.

Thanks for the help (I'm a newbie),

Appreciated

Answer 1

Try creating the subl symlink, it may have been deleted.

In Terminal:

ln -s "/Applications/Sublime Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl" /usr/local/bin/subl

It should now work.

Edit - one other thing you might check. Do you have two versions of Sublime Text installed, ie versions 2 and 3? From what you say about it not opening up properly with subl but opening fine when you click it in the dock, they may be opening different versions. Look in your applications folder.

Answer 2

I was having the same issue, so i ran: ln -sv "/Applications/Sublime Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl" /usr/local/bin/subl (do NOT escape-paste this command)
The output was: ln: /usr/local/bin/subl: **file exists**
and subl wasn't working, so I navigated to the directory it was located in, checked the "get info" and the size was either 24 or 32 bytes (idr) & I deleted it.
After deleting the subl exec file, i ran the original command again and it worked and the new file size is 62bytes)
If you're curios, the output for this sys link is: /usr/local/bin/subl -> /Applications/Sublime Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl

Answer 3

I had this problem when I installed Sublime in Bash, but then switched to Zsh. Since I had installed Sublime using Homebrew, an easy fix was to uninstall Sublime and then reinstall it. After that, the subl command worked again.

Answer 4

Sublime Text 2

ln -sv "/Applications/Sublime Text 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl" /usr/local/bin/subl

Sublime Text 3

ln -sv "/Applications/Sublime Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl" /usr/local/bin/subl