sublime-text-stubs

PEP 561 typing stubs for the Sublime Text plugin API, covering the sublime, sublime_plugin and sublime_types modules.

The stubs carry the API documentation as docstrings, so hovering a symbol in an editor shows the same prose as the official API reference.

Sublime Text exposes these modules only inside its own embedded interpreter, so they cannot be imported or introspected from a normal Python environment. Installing this package as a dev dependency gives type checkers and editors something to resolve them against.

Installation

uv add --dev sublime-text-stubs
# or
pip install --upgrade sublime-text-stubs

Versioning

Versions follow the scheme 1.${st_build_version}.${patch}:

Version	Sublime Text build	Embedded Python
1.4200.*	4200 (stable)	3.8
1.4206.*	4206 (dev)	3.14

The leading 1 is the schema version of this package itself, the middle segment is the Sublime Text build the stubs describe, and the trailing segment is the patch level within that build. This is deliberately not semantic versioning.

Pin the build you target:

sublime-text-stubs = "==1.4200.*"

Sublime Text 4 also still ships a legacy Python 3.3 runtime. It is scheduled for removal and is not targeted by this package.

Notes for plugin authors

• Commands do not declare run. Sublime Text invokes it with command-specific keyword arguments, so the stubs leave the signature to your subclass. Write def run(self, **kwargs), or def run(self, edit, **kwargs) for a TextCommand.

• is_enabled, is_visible, is_checked and description receive their command arguments the same dynamic way, but are declared without parameters. def is_enabled(self), def is_enabled(self, my_arg="") and def is_enabled(self, **kwargs) all type-check. A required parameter is rejected, and correctly so: such an override also raises TypeError at runtime when the command is invoked without that argument.

• TextChangeListener.buffer is sublime.Buffer, never None.

• ValueLike is what you pass in, Value is what you get back. Every parameter a plugin hands a value to is annotated ValueLike, which accepts arbitrary sequences and mappings, so a List[str] variable can be passed directly even though the invariant list[Value] would reject it:

  tags: List[str] = ["fix", "feature"]
  settings.set("tags", tags)
  sublime.encode_value(tags)

  Two things it does not model. A collections.abc.Mapping that is not a dict type-checks as ValueLike, but is rejected at runtime everywhere except Settings.update, which genuinely accepts any mapping. And a value that makes the round trip through Sublime Text comes back as a plain list or dict, not as the type that was passed; bytes in particular is accepted and arrives back as list[int].

  sublime.Region is rejected by both the checkers and the runtime.

• The input handlers are generic. ListInputHandler and sublime.ListInputItem take a type parameter for the value the selected row passes to the command, and that value type is what list_items(), description(), preview(), validate() and confirm() traffic in. You may parameterize on anything a ValueLike allows, so ListInputHandler[List[str]] type-checks, while a bare annotation resolves to Value, which is what the runtime actually delivers. TextInputHandler is a CommandInputHandler[str]. A bare CommandInputHandler, as in the return types of Command.input() and next_input(), still accepts every kind of handler, so Optional[sublime_plugin.CommandInputHandler] keeps working unchanged. The real classes cannot be subscripted on the Python 3.8 plugin host, so parameterize a base class through an if TYPE_CHECKING: alias and quote subscripted annotations:

  if TYPE_CHECKING:
      _StrListInputHandler = sublime_plugin.ListInputHandler[str]
  else:
      _StrListInputHandler = sublime_plugin.ListInputHandler
  
  
  class NameInputHandler(_StrListInputHandler):
      ...

• Several sublime_types names exist only in these stubs, not in the real module at runtime, so each must be imported inside an if TYPE_CHECKING: block:

  • ModifierKeys, the type of the modifier_keys entry of an Event.
  • UIInfo and its parts UIInfoSystem, UIInfoTheme, UIInfoColorScheme and UIInfoPalette, describing the return value of sublime.ui_info().
  • ScopeStyle, the return value of View.style_for_scope().
  • MacroStep, the entries of the list sublime.get_macro() returns.
  • WindowLayout, used by Window.layout(), Window.get_layout() and Window.set_layout().
  • WindowVariables, the return value of Window.extract_variables().
  • FontOptions, the default and callback argument types of choose_font_dialog().
  • ValueLike, the covariant companion to Value, accepted wherever a plugin passes a value into Sublime Text.
  • CommandArgsLike, the same widening applied to command args, mirroring CommandArgs.

The stubs are not validated against the running editor, so divergences from the actual runtime API are possible. Please report any you find.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the project structure, how the stubs are generated and validated, and how to correct them.

License

Not yet chosen. See LICENSE.