Windows – Sublime Text from Command Line

sublimetextterminalwindows

I installed Sublime Text and wanted to know how to open rb files in it from the terminal. I saw What is the command to make Sublime Text my core editor? and I see that I can make Sublime my core editor, but I want to be able to type

sublime file.rb

How do I do this in Windows?

Best Answer

Windows Command Prompt

For Windows cmd.exe you could just add the sublime text installation directory to your PATH environment variable, this would allow you to type:

sublime_text file.rb

Personally, I add a doskey (in a .bat file set to autorun with cmd) so I can type subl file.rb:

> doskey subl="C:\Program Files\Sublime Text 2\sublime_text.exe" $*

Cygwin

For the default bash shell add an alias to your ~/.bashrc file, e.g:

$ echo 'alias subl="/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/Sublime\ Text\ 2/sublime_text.exe"' >> ~/.bashrc

Related Solutions

Python – How to execute a program or call a system command

Use the subprocess module in the standard library:

import subprocess
subprocess.run(["ls", "-l"])

The advantage of subprocess.run over os.system is that it is more flexible (you can get the stdout, stderr, the "real" status code, better error handling, etc...).

Even the documentation for os.system recommends using subprocess instead:

The subprocess module provides more powerful facilities for spawning new processes and retrieving their results; using that module is preferable to using this function. See the Replacing Older Functions with the subprocess Module section in the subprocess documentation for some helpful recipes.

On Python 3.4 and earlier, use subprocess.call instead of .run:

subprocess.call(["ls", "-l"])

Python – How to print colored text to the terminal

This somewhat depends on what platform you are on. The most common way to do this is by printing ANSI escape sequences. For a simple example, here's some Python code from the Blender build scripts:

class bcolors:
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To use code like this, you can do something like:

print(bcolors.WARNING + "Warning: No active frommets remain. Continue?" + bcolors.ENDC)

Or, with Python 3.6+:

print(f"{bcolors.WARNING}Warning: No active frommets remain. Continue?{bcolors.ENDC}")

This will work on unixes including OS X, Linux and Windows (provided you use ANSICON, or in Windows 10 provided you enable VT100 emulation). There are ANSI codes for setting the color, moving the cursor, and more.

If you are going to get complicated with this (and it sounds like you are if you are writing a game), you should look into the "curses" module, which handles a lot of the complicated parts of this for you. The Python Curses HowTO is a good introduction.

If you are not using extended ASCII (i.e., not on a PC), you are stuck with the ASCII characters below 127, and '#' or '@' is probably your best bet for a block. If you can ensure your terminal is using a IBM extended ASCII character set, you have many more options. Characters 176, 177, 178 and 219 are the "block characters".

Some modern text-based programs, such as "Dwarf Fortress", emulate text mode in a graphical mode, and use images of the classic PC font. You can find some of these bitmaps that you can use on the Dwarf Fortress Wiki see (user-made tilesets).

The Text Mode Demo Contest has more resources for doing graphics in text mode.