On Linux, I had an issue where I couldn't even start Sublime Text 3 because there were too many files open and it would hang before I got a chance to change the settings.
I did what Mike Wizowski suggested and edited my $HOME/.config/sublime-text-3/Packages/User/Preferences.sublime-settings
to include those settings.
However, restarting Sublime Text after this did not seem to fix my problem because Sublime still opened all the files and folders.
I found that deleting the 2 ".sublime_session" files in $HOME/.config/sublime-text-3/Local/
made Sublime Text forget what the recently opened files/folders were, thus fixing my hanging text editor.