Adding a newline character to send-text?

[tgirod]

I’m trying to send a command to the repl pane with send-text mycommand. But then I need to send a newline, and it looks like send-text does not recognize special characters such as \n. Am I missing something?

[Screwtapello]

send-text doesn’t take a command-line argument. The idea is that you select the expression (or function, or class, or whatever) that you want to evaluate, then run send-text to copy that text to the clipboard and paste it into the REPL window. It should automatically paste a newline as well, so the expression should be evaluated even if one wasn’t included in the selection.

[tgirod]

Are you sure about that ? tmux-send-text’s help says:

tmux-send-text [text]: Send text(append new line) to the REPL pane. If no text is passed, then the selection is used.

And typing send-text "foo bar" does send “foo bar” to the REPL, but does not add a new line.

[tototest99]

Low effort response: you need to modify send-text found in rc/windowing/repl of the Kakoune repo. For example with OCaml REPL and Kitty terminal I have:

    if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
        text="$kak_selection;;\n"
    else
        text="$1;;\n"
    fi

[Screwtapello]

Ohhh, tmux-send-text. I don’t use tmux, I was testing with x11-send-text which only sends the selection, never a command-line argument.

This seems like the sort of thing that probably should be standardised among the various REPL backends.

[tgirod]

@Screwtapello

This seems like the sort of thing that probably should be standardised among the various REPL backends.

That would be a good thing, yes! I’ll check if I can fix the tmux-send-text command to match the description.

[duncan]

An earlier thread on the same topic might also help you out.

Strip spaces at beginning of line during send-text command

Hello, How can I strip the spaces at the beginning of all new lines in a $kak_selection? The problem is, my repl auto indents all new lines, so essentially I am doubling my indent when I send text to the repl. Btw, I don’t want to change the indent in the actual editor, only the information I am sending to the repl. Thank you, Ben

Also you can do this from kak command line by just selecting some desired text to test.

Preserves NL character:
:echo %sh{echo "${kak_selection}" | sed 's/^[ \t]*//g'}

Removes NL character:
:echo %sh{echo ${kak_selection} | sed 's/^[ \t]*//g'}

Lets us know if you get it going. Bye.

[kanashimia]

to input newline - you need to use raw insert <c-v> and press enter
so send-text command<c-v><ret> <ret>

you can map command to some key
map buffer user <0> %{ :send-text "ls<c-v><ret>" <ret>}

or define wrapper command that adds newline
define-command snd -params 1 %{ send-text "%arg{1}␊" }
notice LF before quote here, that’s how it looks after using <c-v>

[prion]

I didn’t know about the <c-v><ret> trick to insert a ␤ into the command input. I have always written the equivalent command using a literal newline, for example my GHCI REPL wrapper is something along the lines of

define-command ghci-send-text %{
    # strip any extra whitespace, need to add an extra new line to get repl to eval.
    exec Z_
    try %{
        # for multi-line commands
        exec -draft "s\n<ret>"
        send-text ":{
%val{selection}
:}
"
    } catch %{
        send-text "%val{selection}
"
    }
    exec z
}

[tgirod]

Wow, it took me some time to understand I was supposed to actually type “ctrl-v <ret>” in order to insert a LF character

But still, when I run kak inside tmux, open a terminal with :repl and run the command :send-text ls<c-v><ret>, all I get is “ls” appearing in the repl, but no newline entered … Am I being dense?

[useredsa]

I suppose you need to quote the parameter.

[tgirod]

Here we go again. After looking at tmux-send-text's definition:

define-command -hidden tmux-send-text -params 0..1 -docstring %{
        tmux-send-text [text]: Send text(append new line) to the REPL pane.
        If no text is passed, then the selection is used
    } %{
    nop %sh{
        if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
            tmux set-buffer -b kak_selection "${kak_selection}"
        else
            tmux set-buffer -b kak_selection "$1"
        fi
        tmux paste-buffer -b kak_selection -t "$kak_opt_tmux_repl_id"
    }
}

Let’s try this without kakoune, using tmux set-buffer and paste-buffer

<c-b>:set-buffer -b foo "ls\n"<ret>
<c-b>:paste-buffer -b foo<ret>
$> ls
[my files here]>

behold! passing \n to the tmux command works. Now let’s define a command in my kakrc

define-command send-ls %{
    nop %sh{
        #tmux set-buffer -b test "ls\n" #won't work, will send the string \n
        tmux set-buffer -b test "ls
"
#this is ugly, but the \n character is sent.
        tmux paste-buffer -b test -t "$kak_opt_tmux_repl_id"
    }
}

Well, I guess I have a solution now, but I feel like I’m bending backwards to send a newline character …

[tgirod]

You are right, from kak’s command line, :send-text "ls<c-v><ret>" works!

EDIT: And from a command defined in kakrc too, but some invisible character got me …