When I started using Sublime Text 2, I didn't use Sublime's projects feature. This year though, I've started to really get to know my preferred text editor and since then I now save all my code as a project in Sublime. It really does have some great advantages and with a little time it can make working in Sublime a better experience for you.

Sublime's projects are typical of projects in other text editors and IDE's. You open the folder that contains your source code with Sublime and then you can save that source code as a project.

When you save your code as a project you end up with two files. The first is the project file which contains references to folders for your project, project based settings and build commands for your project. The second file is the workspace. This is simply a file that tracks what layout you're currently using and what files you have open in each pane. Using the workspace file means that you can switch to another project, do some work and then switchback to your original project knowing that the layout and files you had open will be restored back to the state you left them in. Handy.

Opening Projects

Let's start with opening projects. You can open a project from the command line by using the project switch from Sublime's executable.

>> subl --project deathstar.sublime-project

Nice, but a tad too much to type. Rather than keying this out when I need to open Sublime, I prefer to alias the opening of a project file into a command that I can remember.

>> sds

Typing these three letters into my terminal to open a project is much easier than trying to remember where the project is and the correct switch for opening a project in Sublime. Now that we have our project open we can start tweaking the project file itself to make suit our needs.

There are three sections to the project file:

1. Folders - You can define a single location for your project or multiple folders that make up a project. This also include filters on files and folders you might want to apply to each folder in this section.
2. Settings - The settings in the editor can be changed on a project basis. If a particular language for your project requires different settings, e.g. tab size, you can define these here and the changes will take affect when you open the project.
3. Build Systems - I tend not to use this, but you can keep a number of different terminal commands here that you can tell Sublime to execute without having to switch to the terminal.

Using Folders

Let's take a look at the most important section which is folders. Although this section is only small it can make a big difference to the way you work with your project and with Sublime.

The project file is just JSON and is fairly easy to follow even if you don't have that much experience with JSON.

{
  "folders":
  [
    {
      "path": "/Users/darthvader/code/deathstar-reactor"
    }
  ]
}

The path setting points to the folder that contains the files for your project. Most of the time you might just have one instance of this in your project file, but Sublime does allow you to have more than one folder in your project file.

{
  "folders":
  [
    {
      "path": "/Users/darthvader/code/deathstar-reactor"
    },
    {
      "path": "/Users/darthvader/code/deathstar-superlaser"
    }
  ]
}

I've been using multiple folders for a couple of projects now. I'm rewriting an application just now that uses multiple folders. For that project I included the old source code and the new source code in the same project so that I can refer back to the old code to lookup any old code.

Which leads us nicely onto names. Having multiple folders in your project can be confusing, especially when projects might have similar folder names or even the same name. To get round this, you can also define a name for each path in your project that will appear in the sidebar. This makes navigating code in your sidebar much easier.

{
  "folders":
  [
    {
      "name": "DeathStar - New & Improved Reactor",
      "path": "/Users/darthvader/code/deathstar-reactor"
    },
    {
      "name": "DeathStar - Superlaser x10",
      "path": "/Users/darthvader/code/deathstar-superlaser"
    }
  ]
}

Perhaps the most useful feature of the projects file though is the ability to exclude files and folders from your project. You are not going to need to see all the files and folders in Sublime when you are coding, so these filters are a great for excluding logs, temp files and other automatically generated files that are not typically needed in Sublime.

Excluding files can be done like this:

{
  "folders":
  [
    {
      "name": "DeathStar - New & Improved Reactor",
      "path": "/Users/darthvader/code/deathstar-reactor",
      "file_exclude_patterns": [
        "*.log",
        "*.pid",
        "*.tmp"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

And excluding folders can be done like this:

{
  "folders":
  [
    {
      "name": "DeathStar - New & Improved Reactor",
      "path": "/Users/darthvader/code/deathstar-reactor",
      "folder_exclude_patterns": [
        "tmp",
        "log",
        "solr"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Switching Projects

Now that we have our project file setup we can get on with using it.

Because I now have a projects file for each project I work on in Sublime, I find it much easier now to simply switch to the project I need to work on, do the work, and then switch to another project. Switching between projects is as easy as Cmd+Ctrl+P if you're working on a Mac or Ctrl+Alt+P if you're working in Windows or Linux. This brings up a list of projects that Sublime nows about and lets you switch projects without leaving the application or returning to the terminal.

The benefit of this is that I only have one window open for Sublime and I can stay focused on the code that I am writing for that particular project. Having multiple projects open is distracting to me and puts me off my work.

I'm not currently using the settings or build systems for a project, but I am looking into running tests from within Sublime and adding these to my project files as build systems.

Getting to know how your tools work and making them work better for you is the key to getting the most out of them. Investing a bit of time in organising your code with Sublime's project files make organsing and working with even multiple folder projects a breeze.