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<title>Launching Sublime Text with dmenu on Alpine Linux</title>
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<h1>Launching Sublime Text with dmenu on Alpine Linux</h1>
<p>2023-04-13</p>
<p>Everyone seems to be running some version of VSCode as their main editor these days. But not me. I find VSCode to be too bloated for my needs - not to mention being built on top of electron instead of <em>native</em> code. I prefer running programs that don't try to devour all of my machine's available memory or spike my CPU.</p>
<blockquote><p><strong>Note</strong>: It's important to remember my personal machine is a ThinkPad X201 with only 6GB of RAM (plan to upgrade to 8GB soon!). Obviously your mileage may vary if you're using a beefier laptop or desktop...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In case the title of this post didn't make this obvious, my editor of choice is Sublime Text. It's fast, has a robust plugin ecosystem, and a very friendly community of users. Because of its popularity, troubleshooting any issues you might encounter becomes much easier with the amount of information freely available online.</p>
<p>The only minor downside is that it isn't <em>fully</em> open source. Personally, I think it is well worth buying a license directly from the developers to support their efforts.</p>
<p>If you haven't played around with it yet, I highly recommend giving it a try. At the very least, I guarantee you'll be impressed with the editor's performance and speed! [<a href="#1">#1</a>]</p>
<h2>One Small Problem...</h2>
<p>Sublime is precompiled against glibc and Alpine uses musl. This makes things a little difficult. Luckily we can get around this roadblock by falling back on flatpak (which is unfortunately still locked at version 3 for Sublime).</p>
<p>You'll need to install flatpak, give your current user permission to install flatpak apps, and then install Sublime.</p>
<p>(The following snippets assume you are using <code>doas</code>. If you are using <code>sudo</code>, be sure to swap accordingly)</p>
<pre><code>apk add flatpak
adduser <YourUsername> flatpak
flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
</code></pre>
<p>Congrats. You now have setup <code>flatpak</code> on your machine! Next we install Sublime Text:</p>
<pre><code>flatpak install flathub com.sublimetext.three
</code></pre>
<p>You could stop now and simply open Sublime anytime by running the following command in your terminal:</p>
<pre><code>flatpak run com.sublimetext.three
</code></pre>
<p>This works perfectly fine but I find it a little cumbersome. I would much rather open my programs directly through dmenu. Let's set that up.</p>
<h2>Creating System Links</h2>
<pre><code>doas ln -s ~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/bin/com.sublimetext.three /usr/bin/sublimetext
</code></pre>
<p>Now that those directories are linked, simply open dmenu and start typing <code>sublimetext</code>. Done and done. No more terminal commands needed to open Sublime!</p>
<hr />
<p><small>
1. <span id="1">I am aware that using a terminal-based editor such as vim or emacs would be even *more* efficient. For my own personal use I find more classical "IDE" applications to work best for me.</span>
</small></p>
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