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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Launching Sublime Text with dmenu on Alpine Linux"
+date: 2023-04-13
+---
+
+
+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 *native* code. I prefer running programs that don't try to devour all of my machine's available memory or spike my CPU.
+
+> **Note**: 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...
+
+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.
+
+The only minor downside is that it isn't *fully* open source. Personally, I think it is well worth buying a license directly from the developers to support their efforts.
+
+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! [^1]
+
+## One Small Problem...
+
+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).
+
+You'll need to install flatpak, give your current user permission to install flatpak apps, and then install Sublime.
+
+(The following snippets assume you are using `doas`. If you are using `sudo`, be sure to swap accordingly)
+
+
+    apk add flatpak
+    adduser <YourUsername> flatpak
+    flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
+
+
+Congrats. You now have setup `flatpak` on your machine! Next we install Sublime Text:
+
+
+    flatpak install flathub com.sublimetext.three
+
+
+You could stop now and simply open Sublime anytime by running the following command in your terminal:
+
+
+    flatpak run com.sublimetext.three
+
+
+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.
+
+## Creating System Links
+
+
+    doas ln -s ~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/bin/com.sublimetext.three /usr/bin/sublimetext
+
+
+Now that those directories are linked, simply open dmenu and start typing `sublimetext`. Done and done. No more terminal commands needed to open Sublime!
+
+
+[^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.