Secure Mode?

[Wint]

I’m looking to use Sublime Text on my personal computer (a Mac) to edit files on my work folder via SSHFS. Now I know I can set up the sublime-project and sublime-workspace on the SSHFS mount, but I know that even vanilla Sublime (no plugins) does some kind of indexing on files that are open, and I’d really like to avoid having anything on the local machine, otherwise I can’t use Sublime for this.

Is this possible already? I know if I was running on Windows I could just use the portable version of Sublime and drop it on the work folder so all of those files are kept on the remote location, but MacOS doesn’t seem to have a portable version of Sublime.

[Wint]

For now, I’ve moved the Sublime Text 3 folder in /Users/user/Application Support/ to the remote drive and created a Symlink, but I’m curious if anyone else has considered this set up?

[addons_zz]

but I know that even vanilla Sublime (no plugins) does some kind of indexing on files that are open, and I’d really like to avoid having anything on the local machine, otherwise I can’t use Sublime for this.

You do not want to Sublime Text

1. To index your files?
2. To save any data from the sshfs on your local machine, after you unmount the location?

For now, I’ve moved the Sublime Text 3 folder in /Users/user/Application Support/ to the remote drive and created a Symlink, but I’m curious if anyone else has considered this set up?

Now you open/mount/has the sublime project on the sshfs location? This seems to perfectly solve your problem. If you do not want to save any files locally.

[Wint]

I’d like to make sure, is there anywhere else they might be stored on the Mac?

[rppn]

Assuming you are using ST3, adding some reference links below that come to mind:

• https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/projects.html (Have you tried adding index_exclude_patterns to settings in your project file? Maybe even ignored_packages if you want certain packages disabled in that situation.)
  • https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/settings.html (Make sure you understand the order of different settings.)
• If it’s fine for you to have the index as long as you’re working … https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/api_reference.html (Did you try writing a Python script? I’m not sure but you probably could make use of plugin_unloaded() which not only gets called when removing the plugin in but also when updating or temporarily disabling it and when Sublime Text closes. So you could maybe manually clear some cache folders that way?) Or use https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/revert.html and write a script that deletes your Data folder and possibly re-adds wanted settings and packages back from somewhere else to it afterwards.

[Wint]

So far I’ve found a couple of side effects of moving my Sublime Text folder and using the symbolic link. The first is that some plugins fail (Anaconda specifically) because I think it’s expecting things to be in a specific location which is unfortunate because I do a fair amount of development in Python these days

Secondly, I can’t access the Preferences from the menu anymore. If I go to Browse Packages and navigate to the .settings file that way I can of course change it there, strange that it’s disabled now in the menu.

It’s not totally unusable and it’s a big step up from what I was having to do before but it would be nice if there were some officially supported way of either packaging Sublime up for portable use on the Mac or ensuring that nothing is retained on the machine if working on a project in a remote folder. I don’t really know enough about Sublime development or Mac development to know if these things are reasonable.