govc.el should support fields commands

[tzz]

In govc.el, currently fields.* commands seem unsupported. It would be useful to have:

• a field editor
• a keyboard shortcut to call the field editor from the VM list
• a fields dump to JSON from the VM list
• a way to search hosts by fields, if that's possible?

[tzz]

I can try to implement some of this, if you think it's useful. I didn't want to start in case the functionality was undesirable or needed to be done in a specific way.

[tzz]

@dougm let me know if this is useful and a possibility?

[dougm]

In general I've stuck with a subset of govc functionality in govc.el, just implementing the most commonly used by myself so far :) I also often use M-& (govc-shell-command) combined with M-w (govc-copy-selection) to run commands that aren't hooked into govc.el.

This does sound like a useful interface to the fields commands and would gladly accept the contribution.

[tzz]

Hmm, I'm not sure what a field editor would look like. Does Emacs or MELPA already have something like that? If not I guess I can use widget.el to implement it... surprisingly I can't recall such a beast :)

[dougm]

Could do similar to https://github.com/dgtized/list-environment.el - prompt for input, call fields.set, call tabulated-list-revert

[tzz]

ha ha @dougm see dgtized/list-environment.el#2 where I ask basically the same question -- seems like a specialized field editor would be useful. I'll check on emacs-devel in case this is a solved problem.

[dougm]

@tzz ha! ok cool, interested to see what you come up with.

[dougm]

Closing out old issues, would still happy to accept the contribution though.