Support keybindings for sending custom sequences to the terminal

[Tyriar]

Example send ctrl+c, up, enter to re-run a command.

[Baitula]

Nice

[njkevlani]

I'd like to work on this.

Need some more information.

1. How user will add new keybindings for "custom sequences to the terminal".
2. Currently,(as of my knowledge) we can assign keybindings to predefined Actions. How do we emulate terminal key presses with actions?

[Tyriar]

@njkevlani cool! Keybindings/commands can have arguments pass to them, we would want to leverage this https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/keybindings#_command-arguments, basically we want expose a command similar to MoveToLineEndTerminalAction and its super class BaseSendTextTerminalAction (inside terminalActions.ts)

[njkevlani]

Didn't know this till now, good to know :) I'll look into it, put my suggestion/questions and open PR soon!

[njkevlani]

Hey @Tyriar, I've coded a class SendSequenceTerminalCommand that extends Command. It takes user defined arguments from keybindings.json. I have some questions.

1. What custom sequences are we going to support? Like ctrl+c up enter, ctrl+r ls enter (To ls last lsed directory). What I mean to say is that can you provide more cases like ctrl+c up enter?

2. Currently, I'm using terminalInstance.sendText multiple time to send a sequence. That is for example ctrl+c up enter goes as

   1. ctrl+c using sendText(String.fromCharCode('C'.charCodeAt(0)) - 64, false)
   2. up + enter using sendText(String.fromCharCode(KeyCode.UpArrow), true)

Is there any better way?

[njkevlani]

Reminder @Tyriar

[Tyriar]

@njkevlani I would expect hex to be accepted, for example \x1b is the escape character, as well as the slash key codes like \n, \a, \t, etc. (see https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js/blob/0e45909c7e79c83452493d2cd46d99c0a0bb585f/src/common/data/EscapeSequences.ts#L31), the args can contain a string with a bunch of data in it which is sent. So you could for example send "ctrl+c, up, enter", or "hello world" just by tweaking the args on the keybinding.

[Tyriar]

Verifier: Please test on Linux or macOS that you can send text and sequences using a keybinding like this:

{ "key": "ctrl+shift+a",           "command": "workbench.action.terminal.sendSequence", "args": { "text": "abc" } },

[njkevlani]

Working on linux. Verified