Quickly open folder as project in Sublime Text from Windows Explorer

Visual Studio Code has this awesome feature that lets you open any directory that you are in as a project. This is so seamless that it has become a deal breaker for me with other text editors and IDEs.

VS Code excels in functionality but it lacks in the shear performance when it comes to handling extremely large files. This is where I always pick Sublime Text as my weapon of choice. I needed to find a way to open any directory as a project and be able to open any large file without having to deal with the choppiness of VS Code. This is how I got it done.

Note down this command

cmd /c “C:\Path_to_your_SublimeText3\subl.exe” .

This will open the current directory in sublime.

Make sure you have the Side Bar visible, or else it look like Sublime was launched as it is, without the directory.

You could also set the hot_exit setting in Sublime to false, as having that enabled opens up the last open directory in another window along with the current directory that it has opened. You probably don’t want that.

Next step is to make it easier to punch in that command. For this you can use a text substitution application of your choice. I use Beeftext for this. This is a really cool tool. Its a reliable, free, open source, privacy focused and I have been using this for a while now. What this does is, it lets you assign triggers and then fills some predefined text when that trigger is received.

For me the trigger is

“subl” and that expands to

“cmd /c “C:\Path_to_your_SublimeText3\subl.exe” .”

When I need to open a directory in Sublime Text. I hit “Ctrl + L” to go to the address bar, then hit subl, Enter.

Voila !