Whenever I’m looking at backtraces, logs, or failing tests in the terminal, I often need to open one of those files in my text editor. It was previously a semi-arduous process that involved highlighting, copying, pasting and the return key. Now, all I need to do is double-click or highlight a line, and then press a keyboard shortcut to open that file & line in my text editor (currently Sublime Text 2.) I’ve also added a thing to my $PROMPT_SCRIPT
that stores my terminal’s most recent directory in ~/.cwd~
, so that the script can handle relative paths. (Most of the time I’m just in the root folder of a given project.)
One extra feature for Ruby developers is support for backtrace lines like this:
app/models/post.rb:225:in `sharing_is_caring'
If you double-click that file, you’ll end up with the following selection: app/models/post.rb:225:in. The script will automatically strip the trailing :in, so you can just double-click instead of manually highlighting.
sudo apt-get install xclip
)~/bin
.mkdir -p ~/bin
wget https://raw.github.com/ndbroadbent/dotfiles/master/bin/open_selected_in_editor -O ~/bin/open_selected_in_editor
chmod +x ~/bin/open_selected_in_editor
Add the following line to your ~/.bashrc
:
PROMPT_COMMAND+="pwd > ~/.cwd~;"
This means that every time you press return in the terminal, the script can use your current directory to determine an absolute path for a highlighted file. It’s not completely foolproof, but good enough for me.
All done! Now you can highlight a filename in the terminal, press your keyboard shortcut, and open it in your editor without the need to copy & paste filenames. Please let me know if you need any help, but I’m sorry I don’t know how to do this in OS X or Windows.