When using Sublime Text 2 we tend to open the side bar to navigate thru files/folders in our projects. For that we can use the hotkey ctrl+k ctrl+b (i
I actually had the same issue, the fact that I had to trigger the reveal in side bar
and then move focus to the sidebar, alongside with the fact that if the file's folder was already unfolded the focus would move to the sidebar's top, all this made me write a new plugin to reveal the file in sidebar and then move focus to there, making it a lot easier to navigate the sidebar with keyboard arrows, give it a try =)
https://github.com/miguelgraz/FocusFileOnSidebar