It is possible to create a Jekyll based blog and maintain it with just terminal based tools (vi etc.). But having a decent text editor such as Sublime Text makes this much less of a chore. Assuming that you have both Jekyll and Sublime Text installed already, here is how you can configure Sublime Text.

Jekyll Plugin

Enter sublime-jekyll, a Jekyll Plugin for Sublime Text. The first step is into install the Sublime Text package manager, Package Control. First invoke Command Palette by pressing ↑+⌘+P Type Package Control In the drop down, select Install Package In the next search window type “jekyll” and press ⏎ Once the Plugin is successfully installed, it is time to configure it. Go to Project ➡️ Edit Project. It will open a blank file. Update it look something like this.

{
    "folders":
    [
        {
            "follow_symlinks": true,
            "path": "<path_to_the_repo_of_blog>"
        }
    ],

    "settings":
    {
        "Jekyll":   
        {
            "jekyll_posts_path": "<path_to_the_repo_of_blog>/_posts",
            "jekyll_drafts_path": "<path_to_the_repo_of_blog>/_drafts",
            "jekyll_templates_path": "<path_to_the_repo_of_blog>/_layouts",
            "jekyll_auto_find_paths": true,
        }
    }
}

Save the file with a name like blog.sublime-project. Once the file is saved, you should be able to see all your repository folders (created earlier in command line by Jekyll) appear on the left panel of the editor if you have the show side bar enabled from the View menu. Sublime calls this a Project. The Plugin allows one to create drafts and promote / publish them (and a lot more capabilities) from Sublime Text. The Jekyll tutorial that I used to create the blog didn’t have placeholders for drafts. I manually created a folder called _drafts in my repository.

Build System

The next step is to create a build system and attach it to the Project. To do this, we can add the following snippet to the configuration above

    "build_systems": [{
        "name": "Jekyll",
        "cmd": "<some_path>/jekyll-build-script.sh",
        "shell": true,
        "encoding": "UTF-8",
        "working_dir": "<path_to_the_repo_of_blog>"
    }]

The jekyll-build-script.sh contains the commands that you would normally use to build and serve in command line.

echo "Start building..."
rbenv local 2.5.3
echo $1
cd "$1"
/Users/$USER/.rbenv/shims/jekyll serve -t

Once this is setup, launching the local server is as easy as hitting ⌘ + b in Sublime Text.