Key binding to spawn external program

[ECon65]

What Operating System(s) are you running on?

Windows

Which Wayland compositor or X11 Window manager(s) are you using?

No response

WezTerm version

20240203-110809-5046fc22

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Is it possible to launch external program (like VSCode) using action of certain key binding?

For example, would it be possible to change the action of following sample Opening whole scrollback in vim to use code -r to open the scrollback in VSCode as editor instead of Vim?

[wez]

Take a look at https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/lua/wezterm/background_child_process.html

[wez]

You don't need the perform_action/action_callback for spawning the background process.
Try something like this:

wezterm.on("trigger-vim-with-visible-text", function(window, pane)
	local dims = pane:get_dimensions()
	local scrollback_text =
		pane:get_text_from_region(0, dims.scrollback_top, 0, dims.scrollback_top + dims.scrollback_rows)

	local name = os.tmpname()
	local f = io.open(name, "w+")
	f:write(scrollback_text)
	f:flush()
	f:close()

	if wezterm.target_triple == "x86_64-pc-windows-msvc" then
				wezterm.background_child_process({
					"code",
					"-r",
					name,
				})
	end

	if wezterm.target_triple == "x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu" then
		window:perform_action(
			act.SplitPane({
				direction = "Down",
				command = {
					args = {
						"nvim",
						"--",
						name,
					},
				},
				size = { Percent = 50 },
			}),
			pane
		)
	end

	wezterm.sleep_ms(1000)
	os.remove(name)
end)

[ECon65]

Hi Wez, thank you for helping me.

I've tried your suggestion but vscode is still not opening. I can see that the temporary file is created in the correct place but nothing else is happening. Are there some logs that I can try to check to see why it is failing?

[ECon65]

Hi Wez, I was able to find the following entry in debug overlay

If the ":28" refers to a line number then it is the line with "code" argument. I have the vscode bin folder in the env path and also I can run the command "code -r " from the terminal to open files in vscode. So I would assume that the program should be known.

08:58:12.918 ERROR wezterm_gui::termwindow > while processing trigger-vim-with-visible-text event: program not found
stack traceback:
[C]: in local 'poll'
[string "?"]:4: in function 'wezterm.background_child_process'
C:\Users<my_user>.config\wezterm/lua\shortcuts.lua:28: in function <C:\Users<my_user>.config\wezterm/lua\shortcuts.lua:7>

[wez]

sounds like you need to use the full path to the code executable

[ECon65]

after providing the full path the error has changed slightly

	if wezterm.target_triple == "x86_64-pc-windows-msvc" then
		-- Configs for Windows only
		wezterm.background_child_process({
			"C:\\Users\\<my_user>\\AppData\\Local\\Programs\\Microsoft VS Code\\bin\\code",
			"-r",
			name,
		})
	end


20:08:48.253 ERROR wezterm_gui::termwindow > while processing trigger-vim-with-visible-text event: %1 is not a valid Win32 application. (os error 193)
stack traceback:
        [C]: in local 'poll'
        [string "?"]:4: in function 'wezterm.background_child_process'
        C:\Users\<my_user>\.config\wezterm/lua\shortcuts.lua:28: in function <C:\Users\<my_user>\.config\wezterm/lua\shortcuts.lua:7>

I was able to fix it with the following change. Not sure whether it is correct solution but it works.

	if wezterm.target_triple == "x86_64-pc-windows-msvc" then
		-- Configs for Windows only
		wezterm.background_child_process({
			"cmd",
			"/C",
			"code",
			"-r",
			name,
		})
	end