Enable fish to call $EDITOR on command line

[GReagle]

This function was originally written by Sanne Wouda and modified by Greg Reagle. This feature is available in Bash as edit-and-execute-command (C-x C-e), and in zsh as edit-command-line.

Can this function be a standard part of fish, and bound to a key such as Ctrl-x Ctrl-e?

# Use $EDITOR to edit the current command
function edit-command
    set -q EDITOR; or return 1
    set -l tmpfile (mktemp); or return 1
    commandline > $tmpfile
    eval $EDITOR $tmpfile
    commandline -r (cat $tmpfile)
    rm $tmpfile
end

[tannhuber]

I suggest to replace the second commandline command:

commandline -r -- (cat $tmpfile)

Look here: #1964

[zanchey]

This will require cleverness to bind as ^X ^E.

[GReagle]

@tannhuber The "--" prevents errors and is an improvement. Thank you.

@zanchey Yea, I have no idea how to get a multi-key binding to actually work in fish. It is not so important what the binding is, just that the feature is there.

[davidmh]

@zanchey @GReagle this seems to work as expected:

bind \cx\ce edit_commandline

[tannhuber]

The function edit-command removes outer single and double quotes. Why? Is there a workaround?

Example:

echo 'single quotes will be removed' "double quotes will be removed" 'double quotes "will be removed"'

[GReagle]

@tannhuber Good catch on the loss of quotes. Definitely a problem. The commandline builtin is not outputting the quotes. This is bug #2210.

[faho]

This is actually a duplicate of #1215.

[hashier]

To everyone who started to copy/paste the solution from here like me. This is not needed anymore. This got merged into fish and got even two shortcuts. Alt-e and Alt-v.

Documentation: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/ (search for "edit the current command line in an external editor")
PR: #3627

[haakym]

This doesn't seem to work in MacOS I just get ´or √ instead - any ideas?

[faho]

@haakym: You want to confirm that $EDITOR (or $VISUAL) is set correctly. In particular if you set it to a GUI editor you need to make sure that it stays until you're done, frequently they fork off and let the shell return. For e.g. sublime this means using subl -w instead of plain subl.

[mfilej]

Hmm, to me it sounds like your terminal might be producing the ´ character (which you get by typing ⌥e depending on the keyboard). There must be a setting somewhere to toggle this, depending on the terminal app that you use.

Alternatively, try esc+e instead.

[haakym]

@faho Thanks for your response. The initial issue was as @mfilej mentioned below, but you were right I didn't have the $EDITOR or $VISUAL var set correctly. I now have this working with Vim via set -gx EDITOR vim.

In particular if you set it to a GUI editor you need to make sure that it stays until you're done, frequently they fork off and let the shell return. For e.g. sublime this means using subl -w instead of plain subl.

That's really handy to know as I was trying to get this working with VS Code and after exiting nothing ever happened. I've now got this working with set -gx VISUAL code -w

@mfilej Thank you - esc+e/esc+v works great. I'm using iTerm2 and found I can update the option key to function as Esc+ as mentioned here: [How do I make the option/alt key act like Meta or send escape codes?](How do I make the option/alt key act like Meta or send escape codes?)

Thanks again both for your help - really appreciate it! This is going to save my wrists some pain :)