HI,
I get the following message in the console : Unable to open /Users/frosken/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 3/Packages/Default/Preferences.sublime-settings
That is because everything is in the ST3 Show Packages folder. ST3 is in my applications folder.
What am I missing? Why do I have a different path on my MacBook?
I will really appreciate your response.
Do preferences still load properly for you (i.e. when you pick the settings command, does the left hand pane in the new window show you the default settings)?
In particular, that error message is a result of the internal command that’s used to show the preferences; it tries to load a package file from the user packages folder, which for packages that ship with Sublime (such as the Default package) do not exist. Once it determines that, it opens the file from the sublime-package file instead.
The TL;DR is “in reference to editing your user preferences, this error message is harmless and can be ignored, so long as your preferences window is showing you the default preferences properly”.
Preferences load properly, it`s just that I get that error message. Why am getting that path shown? Weird.
Do you get that error when? You do some command? It happens by itself?
Some plugin could be doing that.
The internal command used to open settings is trying to open the file Default/Preferences.sublime-settings; that is, a file named Preferences.sublime-settings from the package named Default. That can exist in two places; it can exist inside of Default.sublime-package, and it can exist in a file named Preferences.sublime-settings inside of a folder named Default inside of the packages folder, which on MacOS is $HOME/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 3/Packages.
Whenever loading any package file, Sublime looks for a file in the Packages folder first, and then only loads the version from the sublime-package file if there is no such file found. This is the basis of overrides in Sublime, i.e. the ability to modify the contents of a package without directly modifying the sublime-package file (which will get replaced without warning on upgrade because you’re not supposed to touch them).
So, the error message is just the command saying that it tried to load the file from the Packages folder but was unable to do so. Thus it falls back to the version in the Default.sublime-package file, gets the data, and shows you the preferences. It’s harmless and working as intended.
I would guess that the message is the result of the command internally reusing file opening code used elsewhere in the Sublime core. Normally you would want to see an error message in that case, so the command writes it to the console. In this case the calling code recognizes the error and then does something else in response (i.e. looking inside the sublime-package file).
There is no Application Support/Sublime Text 3/Packages since there is no folder Sublime Text 3 in the Application Support folder (mentioned this in the original post). All the packages are in the actual application and I have to ctrl click and select Show Packages in order to see them. I find it strange that the packages are not found in the Application Support folder. Why were they not placed in that folder upon installation?
The packages that ship with Sublime (Default, the various packages for built in syntaxes like Python, HTML and so on) are installed alongside the binary; Sublime knows to look there for them along with the other locations but it keeps them separated as a subtle reminder not to modify them because they will get replaced wholesale on upgrade.
So just to clarify, when you choose Preferences > Settings, it correctly opens a settings window, there are default settings on the left and your settings on the right, correct? What path are your user preferences stored in if not in Application Support? What folder opens in Finder when you choose Preferences > Browse Packages?
It’s possible (via manual intervention) to change the path to the Data folder (i.e. the folder in Application Support) to be alongside the binary as well, but that’s not how it works by default.