ST (or Package Control) suddenly installed a bunch of packages that I used to use once upon a time. These included Magic Python, Stylefmt, x86 assembly, and others.
This is a fairly fresh install of ST3 that I’ve been using for a month or so, with a very minimal set of packages. It’s a licensed 3126 install on Windows 10 Home 64-bit. The packages it installed are ones that I once installed on previous builds (same machine, new SSD with clean Win10 install, effectively a different machine). Somehow it knew that I used to have those packages, and for some reason it just now decided (Friday? Saturday? I’m not sure what day this happened) to install them.
Digging into this led me to the install_missing option in Package Control settings, and its default of true. So this behavior is consistent with that setting except that it just randomly decided to do it now. And it somehow knew about these packages from last year – is it getting this info from my license, like a cookie or something?
I’ve changed the setting to false, but I thought it might be useful to you know that it was doing this now, as opposed to when I first installed ST3 on this machine (a month ago). It’s such a random time for it to decide to pay attention to that setting.
The other thing that happened at the same time, presumably related to this, is that every time I open Sublime now it throws an error saying it can’t open the JavaScript package. And JavaScript is no longer listed in View–>Syntax… I didn’t have anything special going on with JS, nor did I install a different JS syntax package. There is a JavaScript.sublime-package file in C:\Program Files\Sublime Text 3\Packages, so I’m not sure what the problem is. There’s also a bunch of stuff in the AppData paths, and the way Sublime has packages and caches in all these different places is as confusing as ever – I don’t know where the single source of truth is, where Sublime looks for things. I tried replacing the contents of that Packages folder with the SublimeHQ GitHub packages repo, but that led to other errors (and that repo consists of folders, whereas the Windows folder consists of .sublime-package files, so it’s probably not meant to be swapped in the way I tried.)
It might have installed JavaScriptNext in its sudden old package installation surge – maybe that had something to do with killing JS support. I don’t know for sure because I already cleaned out the packages it installed and the installed_packages list, and I don’t remember all of them. I know it installed HTML Extended.
That’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll do more troubleshooting when I have time – I hope this is useful to you in the meantime.