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BinaryPlist

This is my take at a plist plugin for Sublime Text 3 that should make working with plists feel a lot more first-class. It provides:

  • Automatic conversion of binary plist to XML. You can then edit the XML file in Sublime and it will automatically convert back to binary when you save.
  • Cross platform support. The solution is pure python. No calls to the command line, no foreign-function shenanigans, just 100% python goodness.
  • Plist syntax highlighting from TextMate.

The python plist support is taken from the Python 3.4 standard library, with a few modifications to support running in the Python 3.3 that ships with Sublime Text 3. This library therefore has a heavy dependency on Python 3.x which is why it'll probably never work with Sublime Text 2. Seriously, just use Sublime Text 3+, it's awesome.

Why?

Sublime Text is by far my favourite text editor. It has a fantastic package manager in Package Control which allows you to manage the installation of plugins that extend the functionality of Sublime. Sublime doesn't support binary plists out of the box, but a kind sir by the name of relikd made a plugin that can convert to and from binary plist. I believe this plugin improves on that one in a few key ways:

  1. A more hands-off UX. The other plugin requires you to manually press some arcane key combination to toggle between binary (useless) and XML (useful). I can't imagine any situation where'd you want to edit the binary in a binary plist by hand, which is why this one just opens as binary by default.
  2. This plugin uses a plist implementation entirely implemented in Python, which means it works on any platform that Sublime Text works on. The other plugin calls out to the plutil command line tool built into macOS which unfortunately means it only works on Macs. I also believe a pure python implementation will have less runtime overhead than spawning a plutil process.
  3. This plugin ships with a plist syntax definition. XML plists can of course just use the built-in XML highlighter, but that isn't nearly as strict as plists are, and it doesn't support the "old-style" plist format which you sometimes still see.