The Sublime Text’s support for Markdown is amazing. There are many supported plugins. As suggested in this article, I found Markdown Editing and Markdown Preview to be the most interesting.

But there can be a potential problem during the installation of Mardown Editing - after the Plugin is installed, it once you open the “Mardown Settings - User”, it displays an error which looks like this

Error loading syntax file "Packages/Markdown/Markdown.sublime-syntax": Unable to read Packages/Markdown/Markdown.sublime-syntax

This is usually due to a markdown file that is currently open during the time of installation of the Markdown Editing package. Just close the file and restart the Sublime Text and the error goes away.

Many Plugins such as Jekyll don’t really understand the configuration paths if they are located on the iCloud Drive (com~apple~CloudDocs). I have found it easier to just create a symlink in my local drive to the iCloud Drive like the following

/Users/$USER/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/SublimeText/projects/project_name alias_project_name

So that, my Jekyll configuration looks like this

{
    ...
    "settings":
    {
        "Jekyll":   
        {
            "jekyll_posts_path": "<local_path>/alias_blog/_posts",
            "jekyll_drafts_path": "<local_path>/alias_blog/_posts/_drafts",
            "jekyll_templates_path": "<local_path>/alias_blog/_posts/_layouts",
            ...,
        }
    }
}

Also, following this, I have moved all the sublime configuration to the iCloud so that I can sync them between the macs.

mkdir -p /Users/$USER/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/SublimeText/sync/
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Sublime\ Text\ 3/
mv Installd\ Packages /Users/$USER/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/SublimeText/sync/
ln -s /Users/$USER/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/SublimeText/sync/Installed\ Packages
mv Packages /Users/$USER/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/SublimeText/sync/
ln -s /Users/$USER/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/SublimeText/sync/Packages

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.

The simplest way to install Jekyll is using Homebrew if the operating system is MacOS. Assuming that the Homebrew is already installed, we need make sure that it is up-to-date.

Also, Jekyll is built on top of Ruby. We might not want to mess around with the Ruby installation that comes with the MacOS. So it is preferably to install rbenv first.

brew update
brew install rbenv
ex -sc '1i|export PATH=$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$HOME/.rbenv/shims:/usr/local/bin:$PATH' -cx ~/.bash_profile
rbenv local 2.5.3
gem install jekyll
gem install bundler