Sublime text won’t open error to parse settings:unexpected trailing characters in packages
Sublime text is not opening. I keep getting this error:
When I click OK nothing happens, and when I click Ctrl + Shift + Esc and take away sublime this message comes up again.
I haven’t found a solution on the internet that works. I cannot find preferences or sublime-settings in the packages.
3 Answers 3
The error message you’re seeing isn’t offering to help you solve the problem, it’s telling you where the problem exists. Thus clicking OK dismisses the dialog but leaves the problem behind, so it recurs when you restart Sublime.
In order to fix the problem you need to fix the file that it’s telling you about. The Packages folder can be found by using Preferences > Browse Packages if you’re on Windows or Linux or Sublime Text > Preferences > Browse Packages if you’re on MacOS.
Note that the folder that this opens is not the folder that Sublime Text is installed into (which also happens to contain a folder named Packages ). That folder contains only sublime-package files that ship with Sublime to provide default functionality.
The location that this opens is a folder named Packages that is either stored somewhere in your home directory (which is platform specific) or, in the specific case of the Portable Version of Sublime Text, a folder inside of the portable install (but still not the Packages in the top level).
This command exists because the folder that Sublime uses is generally hidden from casual observation by your operating system, making it harder to find if you don’t know where to look.
From there you can enter the package that’s causing the problem ( User) and open the file with the issue ( Preferences.sublime-settings ) in order to fix it.
The two numbers displayed at the end of the file name ( 12:1 ) tell you the line and column where the error was found, so you can focus your attention on the correct place. The error in question will be somewhere in the vicinity of that location.
In this particular case since the problem is in your user preferences file, you can just select Preferences > Settings (as above, Preferences is under Sublime Text if you’re on MacOS) to have Sublime open the file for you; your file is on the right hand side of the split window that opens.
The error message Unexpected Trailing Characters is a hint that the problem is that there is something other than space/tab characters following the final > character in the file; whatever those are, if you remove them the problem should go away.