SublimeFiletypeConf

Overview

SublimeFiletypeConf is a very simple SublimeText3 plugin that sets the syntax for a file if it finds a certain configuration snippet inside the file. My primary use case was for files that don't have an extension in the filename, which SublimeText will leave as plain-text files, forcing you to manually set the syntax every time you open that file.

An example is worth a thousand words, so here is what you would include in some file to ensure SublimeText knows that it's a Python file:

# sublimeconf: filetype=python

The snippet may appear anywhere in the file, and only the first such snippet found is processed.

The Modelines plugin provides this sort of functionality, and much else too, but I wanted a simpler syntax that allows me to specify the filetype as just python rather than the verbose Packages/Python/Python.tmLanguage. Plus, it gives me an excuse to play with the SublimeText API for the first time.

Status

This plugin is primarily for my own personal use, but it's public in case it's of use to anybody else. If anybody else actually ends up using it, then I might look into polishing it up and getting it into Package Control. Let me know if you'd be interested in using it.

To try out the plugin, clone this repository and create a symlink for the repo into the Packages directory. On Linux, this means that after I cloned the repo as (for example) ~/SublimeFiletypeConf, I then symlinked that repo directory to

~/.config/sublime-text-3/Packages/SublimeFiletypeConf

Key Binding and Command

The default key binding to check a file for a filetype snippet and apply it is ctrl+shift+d on Linux and Windows, and super+shift+d on OS X, but it can easily be changed in the user keybinding settings.

There is also a command available that does the same check-and-apply process. If you open the Command Palette, typing Detect should narrow down the options to the command, which is titled SublimeFiletypeConf: Detect Filetype.

Settings

All the builtin SublimeText syntax types should be supported. See the default_filetype_package_map in the filetypeconf.sublime-settings file for those mappings.

The custom settings described below may be added to the user settings file for this plugin, which will be located in Packages/User. On my Linux setup, this file is located at:

~/.config/sublime-text-3/Packages/User/filetypeconf.sublime-settings

user_filetype_package_map

You can define additional mappings in a user settings file by supplying a user_filetype_package_map property. For example, if you have defined a syntax file with a package path of Packages/myfiletype/myfiletype.tmLanguage, then you could define a mapping for that syntax by setting your user settings file to:

{
    "user_filetype_package_map": {
        "myfiletype": "Packages/myfiletype/myfiletype.tmLanguage"
    }
}

And then you would specify this syntax for a file by including sublimeconf: filetype=myfiletype somewhere inside a file.

on_post_save

The default behavior is that a file is only parsed on load to detect the filetype mapping, so adding a mapping to a file and then saving the file won't change the syntax. You'd have to either close and open the file or use the 'Reopen with Encoding' feature of SublimeText.

If you'd prefer to have every file checked after every save, in order to avoid needing to reopen the file, you can add the following setting to the user settings file:

{
    "on_post_save": true
}

snippet_regex

If you wish to use a custom regular expression to match a text snippet that contains the filetype configuration, you can define one using the snippet_regex setting in your user settings file.

The regex string you supply must escape any backslashes in the JSON, and your regex should match the filetype value (the myfiletype in the example above) in the last group.

For example, if you wanted to match a simplified Vim-modeline-like syntax that only allows vim: plus some whitespace and then a ```set filetype=VALUE`` part, you could set the following in your user settings file:

{
    "snippet_regex": "vim:\\s+set\\s+filetype=(\\w+)"
}

See the built-in snippet_regex in the default plugin settings file for an example of a more complete regex that allows for more characters than the \\w+ given above.