How to get the width of terminal window in Ruby

Question

Have you ever noticed that if you run rake -T in rails the list of rake descriptions are truncated by the width of the terminal window. So there should be a way to get it in Ruby and Use it.

I'm printing some Ascii-art on the screen and I don't want it to be broken. therefore I need to find out the width of terminal at run time some how.

Any Idea how to do that?

Answer 1

ENV['COLUMNS'] will give you the number of columns in the terminal.

Answer 2

Their is a common unix command:

tput cols

Which return the width of the terminal.

Answer 3

If you want your code to work across platforms, here's what I use: http://github.com/cldwalker/hirb/blob/master/lib/hirb/util.rb#L61-71

Also check out the system_extensions file in highline