Disable “A new version of Sublime Text is available, download now?” in Sublime 3 (stable channel)

Question

I am using package manager to handle updates without manual reinstallation.

I installed Sublime as recommended in How do I install Sublime Text 2/3? with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sublime-text-installer

My user settings, after change recommended in https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/disable-update-available-pop-up/1381 are following:

{
"font_size": 11,
"ignored_packages":
[
"Vintage"
],
"tab_size": 3,
"update_check": false
}

Despite this on every Sublime Text start I am attacked by "A new version of Sublime Text is available, download now?"

How can I get rid of this obnoxious popup?

I know that it goes away after ppa is updated and I apply upgrade - but after every release I have about week of pointless, unremovable message spam.

Answer 1

According to https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/issues/1206#issuecomment-221630273 this is one of functions that is removed from evaluation version of Sublime Text.

"update_check": false

in user settings has no effect in an unpaid version.

What makes sense I guess, if you use Sublime long enough to be bothered by this: you are not evaluating it anymore.

Answer 2

Set "update_check": false in user settings has no any effects in an unpaid version. Instead, I just take a easy way by adding a hosts rule 127.0.0.0 www.sublimetext.com in /etc/hosts file. But take care, when you want to install some packages, you may remove this rule temporarily.

Answer 3

As mentioned in the comments, the "update_check" setting has been ignored since about Build 3080. If it was working, setting

"update_check": false

in your user settings should disable the popup you are seeing. Unfortunately, that's not happening currently. You can follow this issue in the unofficial Sublime Text bug tracker to see if it gets resolved.

---

Due to the relatively rapid pace of development at this time, instead of relying on the unofficial PPA, I would recommend instead installing from the Ubuntu .deb files located on sublimetext.com/3. See my answer here for simple instructions on how to do that. Basically, when the new version popup appears, click on the Upgrade button, which will take you to the download page. Click on Ubuntu 64-bit or Ubuntu 32-bit, depending on your system, and save the .deb to your Downloads folder. In the terminal, enter the following commands, where XXXX is the build number:

cd ~/Downloads
sudo dpkg -i sublime-text_build-XXXX_amd_64.deb
# or sublime-text_build-XXXX_i386.deb for 32-bit

And that's it. Sublime is installed into /opt/sublime_text, and the subl shortcut is placed in /usr/bin. It will use the same config directory as the PPA version. If you wish to use sublime instead of subl, run this:

sudo rm /usr/bin/sublime
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/subl /usr/bin/sublime

Please note that if you are a registered user (and you should be if you use Sublime professionally, or for an extended length of time; it's not freeware), you can use the dev builds, which contain more bleeding-edge features, and are updated much more frequently. These builds are only available via .deb.