Sublime Text 3 - Shared platform projects OSX and Windows

Question

Now with Sublime Text 3 and a year on from an older question, I'd like to bring this up again.

Is it possible to setup a Sublime Text project with network paths to folder resources that can be used on Mac(OSX) and Windows platforms.

We have projects which are already created in a windows dominant environment. We are looking to have these working in OSX as well. At the moment a path for a project resource would be mapped to a windows network drive for example Z. The folder setup in the project would look like this:
"path" : "/Z/Custom/Project1"

If I was to create a network mount on OSX and drag the same folder in, it might look like this for Mac:
"path" : "/Volumes/ENV/Custom/Project1"

Is there a way to get this working for both platforms specifically using absolute network paths as the project files do not exist in the same location, so relative would not be a solution here.

Answer 1

Network paths are simply handled differently on Windows vs. OS X. A Windows path might look like:

//server/path/to/file

or, if the server is mounted as a drive:

/R/path/to/file

whereas on OS X all network shares are mounted through /Volumes :

/Volumes/server/path/to/file

As I see it, you have two options. The first is the most obvious: separate .sublime-project files for Windows and OS X. However, depending on the complexity of your projects, this option may take some effort to keep both files in sync.

The second option is to just have both paths in the "folders" section:

"folders":
[
    {
        "path": "/Z/Custom/Project1"
    },
    {
        "path": "/Volumes/ENV/Custom/Project1"
    }
],

You'll have two Project1 folders show up in the side bar, but only one will expand - Sublime gracefully handles the fact that one path doesn't exist. The major issue with this solution is that you may have other project-specific settings that are platform-dependent. For example, I use the Anaconda plugin for Python that provides code completion, linting, and other features. A couple of its settings require the path to the Python interpreter you wish to use for each project, and these paths can be platform-specific, especially if you are using virtual environments.

I suppose there is a third option as well: write a custom Sublime plugin that runs on startup to determine the platform, then generate a .sublime-project file with the platform-specific settings. That would be a non-trivial amount of work and wouldn't allow for multiple users to share the same project file simultaneously (you'd have to store the generated file locally). However, depending on your priorities, it may actually be the best option.