How to pipe input to sublimetext on linux?

Question

How do I receive text from stdin into sublimetext editor? With vim it works like this:

echo "potato potato potato" | vim - 

The same thing works with gedit, creating a new document with the contents.

Sublimetext seems to just start editing a file called "-" in a new tab, is there some other shell trick which could work?

Answer 1

Assuming Sublime still doesn't support opening STDIN, a straightforward solution is to dump the output to a temporary file, open the file in sublime, and then delete the file. Say you create a script called tosubl in your bin directory as follows:

#!/bin/bash  TMPDIR=${TMPDIR:-/tmp}  # default to /tmp if TMPDIR isn't set F=$(mktemp $TMPDIR/tosubl-XXXXXXXX) cat >| $F  # use >| instead of > if you set noclobber in bash subl $F sleep .3  # give subl a little time to open the file rm -f $F  # file will be deleted as soon as subl closes it 

Then you could use it by doing something like this:

$ ps | tosubl 

But a more efficient and reliable solution would be to use to use Process Substitution if your shell supports it (it probably does). This does away with the temporary files. Here it is with bash:

tosubl() {     subl <(cat) }  echo "foo" | tosubl 

I'm pretty sure you can somehow remove the use of cat in that function where it's redundantly shoveling bits from stdin to stdout, but the syntax to do so in that context eludes me at the moment.