Dialog/palette positions in Sublime Text

Question

When you right click in the file explorer in Sublime Text and select new file or move file, you get a single row 'dialog' at the bottom of the window above the status bar in which you can enter a new filename, move a file etc..

Now, I think it is possible to have this dialog pop up in a 'palette' in the middle or at the top of the screen. I say this because I have seen it on someone else's sublime text in a video tutorial.

I'm not sure I'm using quite the right terminology here, 'dialog', 'palette' etc, and have googled several times today but found nothing. I don't know if I need to change a setting, use a plugin etc, but would love to be able to make the change.

I'm using the latest build of ST3 on MacOS.

:wq

Answer 1

The item that you're talking about at the bottom of the screen is an Input Panel; Generally speaking there are roughly three different GUI interactions that you can have with Sublime (disregarding common things like contextual menus and standard file dialogs):

Panels

Panels are small file/input views at the bottom of the screen. Panels are used for input purposes such as in the situation that you mention whenever a command needs to grab generic input or when doing find/replace operations.

Additionally, things like the results of a Find in Files and the output of a build system are also considered panels and are for showing textual output. The icon in the left hand corner of the status line is the panel switcher; click it to see a menu of available panels and open them.

Quick Panel

The quick panel is what you might consider a floating dialog of a sort; it displays a list of predefined items and allows you to select one, using fuzzy matching to help you filter the list.

Since the text you type is just a filter, you can't use this to enter arbitrary text because if you do, none of the predefined items will match and thus you can't select one.

An example of this is if you select Preferences > Color Scheme... in the menu to change your color scheme.

There is a special case of the quick panel used in the Goto Anything functionality (Goto > Goto Anything in the menu) which does allow a little bit of arbitrary text, such as entering :50 to jump to line 50, but this is not something that's exposed outside of the core so plugins can't take advantage of it.

Command Palette

This is similar to the Quick Panel and works the same way; the text you type provides a filter for the items in the list so you can select one.

I'm listing it here as a separate item from the Quick Panel for two reasons; first, the source of the items comes from sublime-command files provided by packages and isn't just a generic list of items. The second is that the recent development builds of Sublime have an input capability here that we'll talk about in a moment.

In all, Sublime is very light on the GUI that it provides to you due to the design philosophy of the developer (the following is taken from this blog post):

• Unobtrusive, minimal chrome. The focus should be on the text, not fourteen different toolbars.

• Don't obscure the text with dialogs.

• Use the pixels you've got. Full screen, multi monitor and editing files side by side should all be possible.

This means that among other things there is no functionality to break panels out into floating windows or change their location in the window; about the best you can do is make panels taller and shorter.

All customization in this regard is (as per the third point above) left to your ability to split the available non-panel window area into whatever layout you find most helpful for having one or more files open at a time.

Now with that said, the latest development builds have introduced a new feature that allows commands selected from the Command Palette to prompt you for the values of their parameters directly inside of the Command Palette.

As of the current time (early April, 2018) this is not in a stable release yet and so this is only available to licensed users since they are the only ones allowed access to development versions.

Without seeing the video you're talking about it's hard to say more specifically what the person was actually doing; if it was a recent video and they were able to create a new file by entering text not in the panel at the bottom of the window, the most likely guess is that they were using a development version and a third party package.