Commands

Warning

This topic is a draft and could contain wrong information!

Commands are the basic building blocks underlying Sublime Text’s automation facilities. Key bindings, menu items, toolbar buttons and macros all work through the command system.

Commands can take parameters and can be bound to a view, a window or the Sublime Text application.

There are built-in and python commands. Built-in commands are included in the editor’s core and python commands are defined as plugins (python scripts). Within python commands, there are shipped commands, included by default, and user commands, added by the user. Don’t read too much into these categorization, it’s merely there for the sake of clarity in these help files–Sublime Text doesn’t care about the differences.

Built-in commands

The official documentation only covers Sublime Text v1 at the moment. The main difference between Sublime Text 1 and Sublime Text 2 is naming conventions. Sublime Text 1 used to use ``camelCase``, but Sublime Text 2 uses underscores to separate words: ``fire_gun``. Most of the time, if a command is implemented and documented for Sublime Text 1, it may work by changing its name accordingly.

See official documentation for commands.

Custom commands

Custom commands are created with python plugins.

Naming conventions for custom commands

Command names are written in CamelCase and are always suffixed with Command (e. g. MyNewCommand, NukeCommand, DuplicateLineCommand).

Sublime Text will unify all command names by removing the Command suffix and separating words with underscores. Following with the previous examples, you would call them like this (with view.run_command or a similar API call):

• my_new
• nuke
• duplicate_line

Otherwise, Sublime Text wouldn’t find them and would fail silently.

Using Commands

There are many ways to use commands, but if you just want to try out one of them, you can use the python console (CTRL + ~).

# UNTESTED view command
view.run_command("goto_line", {"line": 7})

# UNTESTED window command
view.window().run_command("show_minimap", {"key": True})

Note that commands take arguments passed as a dictionary; not **kwargs.

Exploring Python Commands

Shipped commands can be found in many packages under the Packages folder. In Packages/Default you’ll find many python commands that are used frequently.

UNSORTED COMMANDS (WORK IN PROGRESS)

auto_complete build clear_fields close_file copy cut decrease_font_size delete_word duplicate_line exec expand_selection find_all_under find_next find_prev find_under find_under_expand find_under_prev focus_group hide_auto_complete hide_overlay hide_panel increase_font_size indent insert insert_snippet join_lines left_delete move move_to move_to_group new_file new_window next_field next_result next_view next_view_in_stack paste paste_and_indent prev_field prev_result prev_view prev_view_in_stack prompt_open_file prompt_save_as prompt_select_project redo redo_or_repeat reindent right_delete run_macro run_macro_file save scroll_lines select_all select_lines set_layout show_overlay show_panel show_scope_name single_selection slurp_find_string slurp_replace_string soft_redo soft_undo sort_lines split_selection_into_lines swap_line_down swap_line_up switch_file toggle_comment toggle_full_screen toggle_overwrite toggle_record_macro toggle_side_bar transpose undo unindent