Based on forum posts, reddit posts, questions in Discord, messages on IRC and twitter conversations, here are some selected FAQ:
- My tabs, buttons or other UI elements look funny, broken, or red and yellow!
- Build 3143 broke a syntax or package I rely on!
- I prefer the look of Sublime Text 2, or otherwise find it fits my situation better, why did you get rid of it and how can I get it back?
- Build 3143 feels really slow on my Mac (especially with a 4k display)
- The Adaptive theme doesn’t work with macOS Sierra tabs!
- Why is Sublime Text no longer free to use on Linux?
Q: My tabs, buttons or other UI elements look funny, broken, or red and yellow!
This indicates the currently loaded theme is referencing images that could not be loaded. Most likely you are either:
- using a custom theme that is referencing images that are no longer part of the
Theme - Defaultpackage (it was redesigned) - you have overridden the
Theme - Defaultpackage – look for a file namedPackages/Theme - Default/Default.sublime-themeand move it to a safe place for backup - you have customized the Default theme, most likely via a file named
Packages/User/Default.sublime-theme– move it to a safe place for backup
Q: Build 3143 broke a syntax or package I rely on!
The best option here is to report the bug.
All of the syntaxes that are shipped with Sublime Text are open source and maintained at https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages. If you open an issue in that repository, there is an active community of developers who can help diagnose the issue and work on a solution. The more bug reports we get, the more robust we can ensure the syntaxes will be in future releases. That repository also includes instructions on how to use the in-development syntaxes until a future release is made.
If the bug can’t be worked around, we don’t have an automatic way to roll back, however previous releases of Sublime Text are not removed from our download server. You could always deinstall the current version and install the older release that worked for you.
Q: I prefer the look of Sublime Text 2, or otherwise find it fits my situation better, why did you get rid of it and how can I get it back?
The last dev cycle before the release of 3.0 included refreshing the icon and the Default theme, plus adding the Adaptive theme, fixing many bugs in the theme engine and producing full documentation for the theme engine. There were quite a number of bugs and deficiencies in the Default theme, so we took the opportunity to refresh the design. Some of the items we addressed:
- There were no sources for the images in Default theme, and they were almost all only normal resolution. For a number of years, high DPI setups (including retina Macs) were using low-res graphics, and there was no way other than creating a new master source to create them.
- The icons were blurry and indistinct, using the same paper outline for each of the five standard file types (plaintext, markup, source code, images, unknown). The new icons were designed to be crisp and distinctive from each other.
- Scroll bars were always dark, even when the sidebar and color scheme were light
- The design used gradients and shadows to the extent that was more popular 5-8 years ago, but that feels out of place on modern OS releases
- Originally Sublime Text used the standard UI font for operating systems, but that fell out of sync as Apple and Microsoft have evolved their standard font choices
The new Default theme is a refresh of the old design that incorporates the general look and feel, but with a refreshed color palette, more flat aesthetic, and more compatible color choices.
For those that do not like the new Default theme, there are many themes available via Package Control, including a community-developed reimplementation of the Sublime Text 2 theme that is named Theme - Legacy.
Q: Build 3143 feels really slow on my Mac (especially with a 4k display)
There have been some reports since the 3.0 release that the popular Material Theme may degrade performance, especially on Macs. Some users have reported that SublimeLinter may exacerbate the issue. Unfortunately we didn’t see such reports during the dev cycle leading up to the 3.0 release. We will be looking into the issue to try and find a root cause.
Q: The Adaptive theme doesn't work with macOS Sierra tabs!
macOS Sierra tabs do work with the Default theme, but unfortunately are unavailable with the Adaptive theme. To implement the Adaptive theme, we utilize APIs made available from Apple to create a full-height content window that allows us to draw a background behind the title bar. Unfortunately switching a window to use full-height content mode prevents Sierra tabs from being used, since it would require the content to draw background behind the tabs and color the tab labels and close buttons appropriately. The OS disabled the keyboard shortcuts used to create new tabs – this isn’t something Sublime Text is explicitly preventing.
We will investigate future versions of macOS to see if the API provides more flexibility in regards to drawing tabs.
Q: Why is Sublime Text no longer free to use on Linux?
It seems that a number of users following the directions on the Linux Package Manager Repositories page are setting up the dev channel as their repo, without understanding that dev builds require a license key to run.
The stable channel is available for evaluation purposes without a license, however the dev channel requires a paid license. If you are prompted with a license window when you first run Sublime Text, you most likely configured the dev channel instead of the stable channel.