Skip to main content
Adam Johnson Design

How to install Package Control in Sublime Text 3 on Windows

February 7th, 2013 | Adam Johnson

I struggled installing the alpha version of Package Control for Sublime Text 3 Beta on my Windows 8 machine. I figure I'm probably not alone in these endeavours so I thought I'd share how I went about doing it. Here's how to install Package Control in Windows (or at least how I went about it).

Update 8/21/13: Will Bond released v2.0 of Sublime Package Control on August 9th, 2013. He posted great, simple instructions on how to install Package Control. Read and try those techniques first (both “Command Palette” and “Manual”). If both of those don’t work for you, proceed with my instructions:

  1. Make sure you have Git installed (not just GitHub’s GUI Client). Download and install Git from the official Git homepage.

  2. (If you’ve not installed Git yet…) When you open & run the installer, the only things I changed were putting a check by both options under “Windows Explorer Integration > Simple Context Menu” on the “Select Components” pane, then I selected the “Run Git from the Windows Command Prompt” option on the next screen.

  3. Now that Git is good to go, you gotta open the Windows Command Prompt as an Administrator. Search for “Command Prompt” via the start menu, right click it and select “Run as Administrator”

  4. Probably the most confusing thing for me was figuring out where to install package control (there are multiple “Packages” directories on Windows!). The best way to figure out where to install it is to open ST3 and go to “Preferences > Browse Packages”. It’ll open up your Packages folder. Make a note of this path/directory. For me it was “C:\Users\YOUR-WINDOWS-USER-NAME-HERE\AppData\Roaming\Sublime Text 3”. You may have to turn on “View hidden files” to find this directory if you’re going in via Windows Explorer.

  5. Now that we know where to install Package Control, go back to the elevated Command Prompt and type “cd C:\Users\YOUR-WINDOWS-USER-NAME-HERE\AppData\Roaming\Sublime Text 3”. The “cd” part stands for “Change Directory”. NOTE: You’ll have to change “YOUR-WINDOWS-USER-NAME-HERE” to whatever your Windows user account is. See step four for the complete path with your user name.

  6. Type “cd Packages”, then “git clone https://github.com/wbond/sublime_package_control.git ‘Package Control’”. Do not include the double quotes when typing this.

  7. After that, you should be up and running. Be sure to actually read what the command prompt is telling you to make sure it didn’t throw any errors. You may have to close and re-open Sublime for the changes to take effect.

Hopefully that helps people who aren’t as familiar with Git, the Windows Command Prompt, and Package Control. I will emphasize that these instructions are for the Alpha release of Package Control and the Beta release of Sublime Text 3. As time goes on, there may be more robust installation techniques; however, this is how I got started right now.

Perhaps you’ve got a better method? If so, post it online as a follow up. Happy Package Control-ling people.

PS: I wrote a post about some Sublime pro-tips I fancy. Take a gander.

I’ve recently removed comments from this blog. Want to chime in? See something wrong?
Email me at Email me!. I’d love to hear from you. I read every email and welcome your input.