---
title: Automatically open Sublime Text projects in a directory
slug: 5-automatically-open-sublime-text-projects-in-a-directory
date: "2013-05-15T00:00:00+02:00"
categories:
- Tooling
tags:
- Sublime Text
- Bash
summary: >
  How to automatically open Sublimetext with a file, a project or the current
  directory according to the context.
---

I usually start Sublime Text 2 from the command line to work,  depending
on the case, on the content of a directory or on a project (materialized
with a `*.sublime-project` file).

It ends up with one of the following commands :

- `subl .`
- `subl my-project.sublime-project`

Here is the snippet I added to my `.bashrc` file to have the `subl`
command automatically "guess" what I want. It does the following:

- If a path is given (`subl "my/file.txt"`), it opens the file.
- If nothing is given and a `.sublime-project` file exists in the current
  directory, it opens it
- If nothing is given and no `.sublime-project` file has been found, it
  opens the folder.

```bash
function project_aware_subl {
  project_file=$(ls *.sublime-project 2>/dev/null | head -n 1)
  subl ${*:-${project_file:-.}}
}
alias subl="project_aware_subl"
```