I’ve been having this issue where the preferences menu is greyed out for me. I didn’t realize it was an issue until a co-worker installed Sublime Text 2 and his preference menu worked fine. I’ve used Sublime for a long time now and this isn’t a new thing, I just dismissed it as maybe as an unimplemented beta feature, but now having seen it function elsewhere I would like to know a fix. I deleted my Sublime app and preferences and reinstalled and still no preferences.

Try pressing command+shift+p. Then type “preferences.” There should be a list of commands to choose from. There is no Preference menu per se in sublime. There are JSON files that control your personal settings. Make sure you are running the latest build. If all else fails, try reverting to a fresh state: sublimetext.com/docs/2/revert.html

That is bizarre then. My co-worker installed the app fresh last week and he definitely has a menu with numerous options in it. He could select what theme he wanted to use. When you selected a preference it would open a json file, but at least it did that. The shortkey you mentioned did allow me to find the preference files, but it’s definitely not the same way as my co-worker has available to him. We checked and it’s all the same version too. Really bizarre.

This is true! Up until today my Preferences used to work fine in OS X, you could even select your theme from them. This was working from the first time I installed ST2. Now they are greyed out. I suspect it might have something to do with Ruby (please correct me here). I had to fight with it, reinstall it and Rails and gems in order to be able to use the gems mysql2 package with MAMP.

This is the only change I’ve made to my Mac and now the prefs don’t work, however I cannot be sure it was this because I didn’t check the prefs for a few days.

Is anyone else seeing the same thing?

Now they’ve magical come back after a computer restart. Very strange.

This has been happening, on & off, to me ever since I’ve used ST2. Usually a restart (of Sublime) will fix the issue. Its annoying but I have learned to live with it - no idea what could cause it…

I’m going to drudge this topic back up again. Has there been any headway on this issue? I have never had a preferences menu not greyed out for me in Sublime. Is there some reason or fix for this? All my co-workers have installed Sublime without issue and have it, yet I don’t. I’ve uninstalled and done a clean install of Sublime and still nothing. As it’s a work machine I don’t really have the option of doing a fresh OS install, nor do I really wish to go to those lengths to fix something so minor.

slideaway: Did you try following the instructions at sublimetext.com/docs/2/revert.html?

I get this too, and it is specifically an OSX issue. It only happens sometimes. Usually if I restart sublime it goes away. It is kind of annoying.

Yes, I’ve seen it happening on and off too. Somewhat irritating, but at least for me it is not a big thing, since I just open the Packages/User folder directly anyways.

Would be nice if it was fixed eventually though.

I wave been watching this behavior a bit, and just wanted to post my observations. The menu started out activated when I installed 2180. It then deactivated when I installed a new plugin, don’t remember which one though. It stayed disabled after installing 2182, I never installed any plugins while on that release. And after updating to 2183 it is now enabled again. I’ll keep an eye on what’s happening when I install any more plugins.

All in all this is no big deal, it is just weird that it is behaving so randomly.

Bumping to say that Preferences is disabled again after installing 2184.

The next time someone encounters this, it’d be helpful if you could check a couple of things:

• Is the entire Preferences menu greyed out, or just the Settings entry within there? e.g., does Preferences/Browse Packages still work?

• If a project is open (i.e., Project/Close Project is enabled) is the Project/Edit Project menu item enabled?

• Does editing preferences via the Command Palette work?

[quote=“jps”]The next time someone encounters this, it’d be helpful if you could check a couple of things:

• Is the entire Preferences menu greyed out, or just the Settings entry within there? e.g., does Preferences/Browse Packages still work?

• If a project is open (i.e., Project/Close Project is enabled) is the Project/Edit Project menu item enabled?

• Does editing preferences via the Command Palette work?[/quote]

Keeps happening for me, for instance now in 2188. The entire preferences submenu is disabled. No project open. Editing via the command palette works as expected. And opening User/Preferences.sublime-settings with Super+, also works, even though the command is not available in the Preferences menu.

Same here. And it doesn’t always happen. It seems to only happen on occasions, and usually if you restart ST2 one or two times, it goes away.

I just checked in on this issue having mentioned something in December about it. I did try resetting to fresh install as suggested, but no luck there either. My problem isn’t that it comes and goes, it’s that it’s never been active, period. Such a weird challenge. I checked and it does work on my Mac at home, but not at work.

I ran into this today and found that it was because my symlink for subl was in /opt/bin rather than ~/bin. So, if I launched the ST app from LaunchPad, finder, I would see Preferences enabled. If I ran from terminal it was disabled. So, I just moved the symlink to my folder.

HTH,
Mark

Happens to me too, but only if I’m trying to do things as ST2 is launching, like opening the command palette or trying to open preferences. It doesn’t happen necessarily consistently (it occurs far more often when ST2 takes a while to launch), but relaunching always fixes the problem. Key bindings for opening preferences still work (Command-Comma will open my preferences), it’s just that the menu item is disabled and grayed out.

I’m seeing the same problem with Mountain Lion and unfortunately restarting Sublime or even a reboot isn’t resolving the problem. Is there any chance this is going to get resolved anytime soon??? Based on the Forum, its been an issue for over a year

I experienced the same problem, and I tracked it down to be when I was running “SecondBar” to display the menu bar on multiple screens.

Mike