Sharing terminal width with elevated processes

[jviotti]

Hi, I'm having some issues running a script that uses inquirer with windosu.

The problem is that within windosu context, inquirer is unable to correctly get the width of the terminal, which is being calculated with cli-width.

I've submitted a PR to inquirer to set a default width of 80 characters which seems to work fine in most cases, however there is a way to make windosu share the correct width with the script it executes:

cli-width (in the latest version, v1.1.0), attempts to read the width from an environment variable (CLI_WIDTH) before going for the default value.

This gives us an opportunity to calculate the width from windosu and pass it to child processes like this:

var cliWidth = require('cli-width');
var child_process = require('child_process');

child_process.spawn('foo', [ 'bar' ], {
    env: {
        CLI_WIDTH: cliWidth()
    }
});

This way, scripts being called with windosu have a way to inherit this value, even if not written in NodeJS.

What do you think?

I'll send a PR for demonstration purposes later today, once I have access to a Windows PC.

[tehsenaus]

Sure, this sounds very reasonable. I look forward to seeing the pull request!

[jviotti]

@tehsenaus PR sent!