Rebase Key Bindings for Sublime Merge

Editing Git history (or Interactive Rebasing) in Sublime Merge is a joy. And can be even better, with some keybindings!

For the last couple of years, I’ve been happily using Sublime Merge, the last Git interface from the creators of Sublime Text.

I personally find it super fast and I particularily like the 3-way merge interface as well as its command-oriented interface.

Another feature I appreciate in Sublime Merge are the actions for editing your Git history, available from the Edit Commit menu. I understand many would favor the command line interactive rebase interface - which is indeed hard to beat in terms of ergonomics. Still, rather than going back and forward from Sublime Merge and the CLI, I end up performing all rebases from Sublime Merge.

Thing is, in Sublime Merge the Edit Commit actions don’t have a default key binding associated to them. Luckily, that’s easy to change.

Here’s how:

1. In ~/Library/Application Support/Sublime Merge/Packages/User/, create or edit a file named Default (OSX).sublime-keymap
2. In that file add the following configuration:

[
    {
        "keys": ["option+shift+down"],
        "command": "move_commit",
        "args": { "commit": "$commit", "down": true },
    },
    {
        "keys": ["option+shift+up"],
        "command": "move_commit",
        "args": { "commit": "$commit", "down": false },
    },
    {
        "keys": ["option+shift+f"],
        "command": "fixup_commits",
        "args": { "commit": "$commit" },
    },
    {
        "keys": ["option+shift+s"],
        "command": "squash_commit",
        "args": { "commit": "$commit" },
    },
    {
        "keys": ["option+shift+f"],
        "command": "fixup_commits",
    },
    {
        "keys": ["option+shift+c"],
        "command": "edit_commit_contents",
        "args": { "commit": "$commit" },
    },
]

Then save and restart Sublime Merge.

The configuration above allows you to:

• Move commits up/down
• Fixup commits
• Squash a commit with its parent
• Edit commit contents (split a commit, modify its contents, …)

That’s all (at least for macOS)! Hope it will help those of you enjoying Sublime Merge - or my future self when looking for this answer!