How to install Sublime Text 2 on Ubuntu 12.04 (Unity)

Step 1

Download the tarfile that suits you best and extract it. Here’s the command to extract tar.bz2 files:

1.tar xf Sublime\ Text\ 2.0.1\ x64.tar.bz2

You’ll notice that I got the 64-bit version. The reason is that it’s lightning fast. So, go for that if you can!

Step 2

You’ll get a “Sublime Text 2″ folder after extraction. This folder contains all the files that Sublime Text will need. So we have to move that folder somewhere more appropriate. Like the “/opt/” folder :

1.sudo mv Sublime\ Text\ 2 /opt/

Step 3

At some point you’d want to be able to call Sublime Text from the Terminal by just typing “sublime”. To do that, we’ll just create a symbolic link in “/usr/bin” like thus:

1.sudo ln -s /opt/Sublime\ Text\ 2/sublime_text /usr/bin/sublime

Step 4

Now that our files are at the right place, we need to create a launcher in Unity. To do this, we’re going to create a .desktop file in “/usr/share/applications”:

1.sudo sublime /usr/share/applications/sublime.desktop

And paste the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Sublime Text 2
# Only KDE 4 seems to use GenericName, so we reuse the KDE strings.
# From Ubuntu's language-pack-kde-XX-base packages, version 9.04-20090413.
GenericName=Text Editor
Exec=sublime
Terminal=false
Icon=/opt/Sublime Text 2/Icon/48x48/sublime_text.png
Type=Application
Categories=TextEditor;IDE;Development
X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=NewWindow
[NewWindow Shortcut Group]
Name=New Window
Exec=sublime -n
TargetEnvironment=Unity

As you can see, these lines are quite straightforward. Go ahead and experiment a bit with them.

Step 5

Now you would probably want to open all text files with Sublime Text 2. The easiest way to do that is to open up the file associations list:

1.sudo sublime /usr/share/applications/defaults.list

And replace all occurrences of gedit.desktop with sublime.desktop.

Tada ! There you go. You now have Sublime Text 2 installed on Unity on Ubuntu 12.04, like a pro.