commandline -r broken in Fish 3.4.0?

[christianheinig]

I use Mac OS Montery 12.3 and iTerm2 and just upgraded Fish shell to 3.4.0.

One of my functions stopped working, because commandline -r "xyz" does not replace the command line anymore. -a does not seem to work either.

I've seen that the commandline command has been updated, but it seems that the old behavior should still work.

[faho]

You're going to have to add some more context here.

Specifically, what triggers the commandline call? Is this in a binding?

For the record:

bind \eb 'commandline -r xyz'

and pressing alt+b works for me.

[christianheinig]

Hi Fabian, thanks for your reply.

For me, commandline -r "xyz" works neither directly in a iTerm2 shell (iTerm2 version is 3.4.15, by the way), nor as a binding in fish_user_key_bindings.fish, nor in my function.

My function in ~/.config/fish/functions/commit.fish which prepares a git commit message that includes the JIRA issue key:

function commit

  # Get git branch name, extract JIRA issue key and store in variable _ticket, omitted here
  set _ticket ...

  commandline -r "git commit -m \" ($_ticket)\""
  # Move cursor before issue key (when removing this, it still doesn't work)
  set _ticket_length (string length $_ticket)
  commandline -C (expr (commandline -C) - $_ticket_length - 4)
end

[faho]

For me, commandline -r "xyz" works neither directly in a iTerm2 shell

If you run commandline -r xyz interactively, that will run, replace the commandline, then the new prompt will be started and will clean the commandline. This is as expected.

The same thing goes for the function when you run that interactively. I.e. if you enter commit into the commandline and press the return key, that will change the commandline, then the new prompt will happen and the commandline will be cleared again.

Having that change the commandline and then have it magically appear later isn't something we can really support. If it did work in earlier versions that's by accident.

Now, what should be working is to do it as a binding:

nor as a binding in fish_user_key_bindings.fish

Note: fish_user_key_bindings hasn't been needed since fish 3.0. It will still be executed if it is there, but it's not necessary.

But just to confirm: If you run

bind \cg 'commandline -r xyz'

in an interactive session, and then you press ctrl+g in that interactive session, does it replace the commandline with "xyz"? (I switched it from alt+b because I remembered some mac terminals like sending bad things for alt bindings if some setting is checked)

[christianheinig]

Your latest binding to Ctrl+G works!
And it still works when calling my function in the binding. I will have to get used to using a shortcut instead of typing "commit", but as long as I don't have to type the issue key by hand I'm happy.

Thank you! :-)

[EvanTheB]

EDIT: apologies, I had not tested it as thouroughly as I thought. this is not working.

I restored the original behaviour with a small function:

function ecommandline
    set -g ECOMMANDLINE $argv
end

(append to end of fish_prompt):

    commandline $ECOMMANDLINE
    set -e ECOMMANDLINE

[phillco]

Interesting! I never knew that using commandline in an interactive session wasn't meant to be supported -- I had a couple of functions that used it, and always thought it was rather cool feature of fish (one example from Stack Overflow: substitute).

Like substitute, it was cool to be able to take a recent command, modify it, and then put the modified command onto the prompt (and even execute it), while having the modified version behave just like a normal command (appear in the command buffer, show up in up-history, etc.)

I guess the closest thing would be to eval the modified command, then append it to the history file / reload the config, but it won't be quite the same.

[viveksjain]

Thanks for the suggestion @phillco. In case anyone else would benefit from an example, my use case was to take the current commandline, execute it and pipe through fzf, then set the commandline with the output. Here's what I did:

function fzf_prompt
  set -l cmd (commandline)
  echo
  eval $cmd | command fzf | while read -l r; set result $result (string escape $r); end
  if [ -n "$result" ]
    echo "- cmd:" $cmd >> ~/.local/share/fish/fish_history
    echo "  when:" (date "+%s") >> ~/.local/share/fish/fish_history
    history merge
    commandline -- (string join " " $result)
  end
  commandline -f repaint
end

Then you can setup a keybinding in fish_user_key_bindings.fish with bind \ef fzf_prompt.

[ridiculousfish]

This keeps coming up and it looks easy enough to fix, so I will just fix it. commandline foo now does what it did in 3.4.x.

[phillco]

Oh, man, awesome! Thanks! This is one of those features that makes fish special for me.

[adrian-gierakowski]

@ridiculousfish I guess this deserves a release?

[faho]

I guess this deserves a release?

@adrian-gierakowski A release will be out in time. We tend to do one every few months, not for specific features.

[phillco]

Just to close the loop for anyone subscribed, @ridiculousfish's fix shipped in 3.5.0: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/relnotes.html#fish-3-5-0-released-june-16-2022 :)