Question

I would like to give users of my simple program the opportunity to open a help file to instruct them on how to fully utilize my program. Ideally i would like to have a little blue help link on my GUI that could be clicked at any time resulting in a .txt file being opened in a native text editor, notepad for example.

Is there a simple way of doing this?

Answer 1

import webbrowser
webbrowser.open("file.txt")

Despite it’s name it will open in Notepad, gedit and so on. Never tried it but it’s said it works.

An alternative is to use

osCommandString = "notepad.exe file.txt"
os.system(osCommandString)

or as subprocess:

import subprocess as sp
programName = "notepad.exe"
fileName = "file.txt"
sp.Popen([programName, fileName])

but both these latter cases you will need to find the native text editor for the given operating system first.