Sublime Forum

Running multiple instances of Sublime Text

#1

Hi,

this was discused few times but once again let me raise a hand.

Is there way running multiple isolated instancies of ST? For example in NixOS it is trivial to create isolated shell (using nix-shell) environment with pinned version of tools and rutimes. This allows easy reproducible development environment (and in same time does not populate general system with otherwise unnecessary libraries and executables).

Visual Studio code has such ability. Running multiple shells from ST is not an option, only running isolated ST from parent shell is.

I know that there is ST safe mode, but it has differend use case.

ST and SM is great piece of software. SM is okay to run as one instance per system, ST unfortunatelly not and limits its usage.

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#2

You can make a portable build by adding a Data directory next to the executable, which lets you have a separate “profile”.

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#3

Thanks for reply. Well, it works at least, but is still far from perfect.

1.) Data directory must be relative to ST executable (checked with strace), this is especially problematic on NixOS where programs and libraries are located on read-only filesystem
2.) The way, ST search for Data directory prevent symlinking ST executable (symlinking is common way on NixOS how to create isolated environment)

So the only solution is to copy whole ST tree into project subdir with custom Data subdirectory. It would be nice if ST honor some environment variable pointing to Data subdirectory instead.

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