Testing a package -- portable Sublime for Mac or Linux?

[ThomSmith]

I’m testing a new package that depends on another package and installs that package before running. Testing that functionality is extremely tedious. Is there a simple way to create a new Sublime installation that won’t interfere with an existing one? I’m aware that a portable version exists for Windows, but I don’t have any machines running Windows.

[kingkeith]

How to launch ST3 instance with alternative profile (for plugin development) along with another instance with regular profile (for editing)?

I don't know if it' documented anywhere, but you can use a "portable" version of Sublime under linux as well. If you download and extract the tarball version and then make a directory inside the extracted sublime_text_3 named Data (case is important, I would expect), when you run sublime from that location it will use that data directory instead ~/.config/sublime-text-3 Note however that if you do this you can't have other versions running because the executable seems to communicate with an…

Relocating the "data" directory

It is theoretically possible to swap the Data directory around on MacOS, although this is not documented and thus probably not officially supported. If you create a Data directory inside of /Applications/Sublime Text.app/Contents/MacOS, Sublime will use that as it's Data directory instead of the default, just as it will for Windows and Linux if you create such a directory in the appropriate place. This is how the Windows portable version works, but is only documented for Windows and not the o…