Use an external text editor

Important: Athens (2025.1) introduced fundamental changes to Sketch. API documentation may not be up to date.

Use your favourite text editor, such as Atom or Visual Studio Code, to write Sketch plugins by setting a user default on the command-line.

For Visual Studio use:

defaults write com.bohemiancoding.sketch3 "Plugin Editor" "/usr/local/bin/code"

For Atom use:

defaults write com.bohemiancoding.sketch3 "Plugin Editor" "/usr/local/bin/atom"

Note: Restart Sketch for the changes to take effect.

Usage

Open Preferences › Plugins from the menu, show the context menu of the plugin you want to edit and select Edit Code….