Edit command doesn't write to history

[jackkinsella]

I spend most of my Ruby time programming from pry and I recently discovered that the edit command lets me craft a piece of code in good old Vim before executing it.

A feature that I'm missing (or perhaps that I just don't know how to enable) is the ability to press "up" then "enter" to quickly re-execute the last line of code. For me, that's a staple of REPL programming - be that in shell, postgres, or pry.

I know that this feature doesn't make sense for advanced uses of the edit command, like editing a file: All I'm talking about here is modifying the basic argument-less edit command to write its contents to history.

If this is something you're interested in, I'd be happy to send a PR.

[ghost]

Cool idea! But by just pushing with Pry.history.push it would add newlines in a single history entry (which I do not find bad in whatever). You could also split the code line by line and then push each line the irb style. This should be discussed.

[jackkinsella]

Awesome! My two cents is that the most intuitive approach would be one where the whole command can be repeated with two keystrokes – that's the workflow that I've come to expect from other REPLs. This is gonna entail pushing newlines into the history entry, as you said.

I guess we could give it a shot and see how people respond - after all, we could always add a configuration option to modify this behavior in future.

[jackkinsella]

To expand on what I said above – I use keyboard shortcuts in TMUX to press up and enter in other screens, and I'm certainly not the only programmer who takes this approach. The way of dealing with new-lines that keeps this workflow working with pry would be my preferred solution.

[ghost]

Then I guess there should be a way to edit a multiline command saved in history. And I'm not sure that if someone were to press up and down the cursor would behave as expected without minor tweaks.

Note that I'm not related to Pry. I'm just discussing that specific issue.

[banister]

I've been thinking about this too -- if you guys want to implement this feature i'd be happy to review and possibly merge it too :)

[jackkinsella]

Kewl! I'll familiarize myself with Pry's codebase when I get a free afternoon and then dig in :)

[ghost]

Here is what I get so far: https://asciinema.org/a/zll7fXAGp9IrEd0khlF7ZRAql. Just by adding Pry.history.push content in repl_edit. As you can see small tweaks can be achieved. But I think there should be a command to edit a given history entry. Like edit last or edit 23. Editing "the last entry that has been edited in an external editor" can apparently be achieved using edit -r. I'm still trying to find a way to edit history entries.

[ghost]

So I just got back from my english class and I managed to get the whole thing to work. With edit -s 12, we can edit the given entry. I created a repl_edit method that call on repl_edit_ because I couldn't figure how to introduce a new argument (which is the text to edit) without breaking the other calls to repl_edit. Is that the right thing to do ? Also if the number of argument is invalid, should I throw a CommandError ?

Note that positive indexes are only valid when you read them using hist -a. (I decided to not accept positive numbers due to possible confusion when using hist with different parameters.) For the negative ones, -1 is the last expression and so on...

Here is a video: https://asciinema.org/a/rrRTqwBj9ItnAKv6tEIprTLuL

[ghost]

Finally I added an argument to repl_edit, finding there was no calls I could break.

[ghost]

Any update ? Anyone ?

[jackkinsella]

@breakfast1 - I read through your PR and it looked like you were going for a more ambitious change than what I proposed here. I pushed an MVP PR that just addresses the basics. I suggest you create a separate issue and PR re: the new flag you're proposing.

[ghost]

I'll leave it like that as I have no time to re issue and fix the code. But I agree with you. Thanks for replying.

I mentioned your PR in mine and closed it.

[kyrylo]

Fixed by #1752.