I’m trying out Sublime Text 2 as a code editor on Windows, since there really aren’t any other free ones I like; unfortunately, my favorite free editor, Gedit, is abysmal on Windows. (Although it looks like something may be done about that soon.) Sublime works really well and has a distraction-free mode, and the extensibility is amazing. I’m not convinced yet that it’s worth $60 for a license — I’d probably pay $25, come on, it’s a text editor — but perhaps if I got a job where I needed text editors more often, I’d try to convince my boss to spring for it. (Although in that case, I’d more likely try to convince my boss to let me work on a platform where I could run Gedit.)
One thing that confused me is that I couldn’t get any of my Python GUI code to work on it. For example, when I’m at work in my lab, I often make small changes to my laser beam profiling program (although really it’s more of a camera driver right now; I haven’t found an excuse to actually write any Gaussian profiling code.) As far as I could figure out, I ought to be able to press Ctrl+B in Sublime Text to run the program. However, nothing ever happened, and I thought the feature must be broken.
Then one time I tried running another non-GUI Python script from Sublime Text. To my surprise, it worked! The feature apparently wasn’t really broken, just selective.
The key to this mystery was the following sentence from the Sublime Text 2 reference wiki:
On Windows, GUIs are suppressed.
Wait, what the what? Why would anybody want that? I guess so the console window doesn’t show up. Fortunately, it’s easy to remedy. Go to Preferences→Browse Packages, open the Default directory and then open exec.py in the editor. Around line 26, you’ll see:
# Hide the console window on Windows
startupinfo = None
if os.name == "nt":
startupinfo = subprocess.STARTUPINFO()
startupinfo.dwFlags |= subprocess.STARTF_USESHOWWINDOW
Comment out the last line of this block. Now, whenever you start a Python program, the console will be displayed. If you want to get rid of it, make your build system invoke pythonw instead of python. (Tools→Build System→New Build System, then copy Packages/Python/Python.sublime-build and change python to pythonw.)
The Mad Scientist Review 