`sc` command name conflict on windows

[askor]

Hi!

It seems sc name is already taken on my machine, by Sc.exe Query.

I'm not sure how to handle this, as the :pipe in helix doesnt recognize my shell's aliases, so I can't alias smartcat to some other command.

Windows might also use Sc.exe for critical things, so removing it from Path is probably also a bad idea.

Any suggestions welcome, as I was really hyped to use smartcat :)

[askor]

My fix is to change the name of the smartcat sc.exe to something else like d.exe in C:/Users/askor/.cargo/bin/. It's not nice with updates, but works for now

[efugier]

Hey, I don't think there is a way to make it play nice with updates 😕

What you can do to make them more convenient is to script the process:

cargo install smartcat
mv .../sc.exe /.../new_name.exe

What did you rename it to?

[askor]

I renamed to d.exe. Apparently, it doesn't work entirely, but I'm not sure if this is a different windows issue or not.

With it renamed to d.exe, it works in the terminal, but in my Helix editor I get the following error:

Sorry but windows is perhaps not the best when it comes to CLI stuff :( I could potentially try in WSL or I might swap to linux at some point.

Let me know if I should test anything, and please close this if it's a dead end.

[efugier]

Well that's quite a weird bug! It's as if the quotes aren't recognized 🤔

It seems to think make is the first arg, it the second one, and not another one, as if the quotes were lost in between Helix and the shell.

Have you tried using single quotes?

After some looking around I came across this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6714165/powershell-stripping-double-quotes-from-command-line-arguments

Which seems to be related to your issue. Let me know if either single quotes or something from that thread does the trick!

[askor]

I tried the variations '"input"', '\"input\"', but still doesnt work.

In a normal powershell terminal, this works. Also, I'm running Helix in Nushell, but this looks like this is a Helix issue and not smartcat

Echo no quotes

Smartcat without quotes

Echo with quotes

Not sure what to make of this

[efugier]

Have you tried using only single quotes?

like

pipe:d 'say hi please'

I am actually using helix with nushell as well but on a linux machine and I don't have the issue 😕

echo is supposed to work fine without quotes but the echo with quotes behavior is wrong: it should only output with quotes and not print escaped quotes.

So something shady definitely is happening to your quotes.

[efugier]

Closing for inactivity, feel free to re-open later on 🙂

[kurushimee]

To others running into this, I fixed it for myself via a link to sc.exe under a different name. Basically, I ran:
sudo ln -s C:\Users\user\.cargo\bin\sc.exe C:\Users\user\.local\bin\scai.exe
where ~\.local\bin is in my path (and I'm pretty sure ln is just a pretty alias for whatever PowerShell uses for links - I installed ln with scoop install ln)

[kurushimee]

Also, for everyone using Helix - you need to change your shell from CMD to PowerShell in Helix config.toml:

[editor]
shell = ["pwsh.exe", "-NoLogo", "-NoProfile", "-NonInteractive", "-Command"]

Because pipe in Helix is broken if you just use the default CMD shell, it adds \ to all quotes and breaks the command. Doesn't do this if you use PowerShell as your pipe shell instead