Kak session manager snippet

Recipes & Guides
1

Thought I would share some snippets here about how I manage my kakoune sessions, in case it’s useful for anyone else.

I prefer to have one session per git repo named after the path to the repository, stripped of non-alpha-numerical characters. If I launch kakoune inside a git repo it sees if the session already exists and joins. Otherwise, it creates the session. If I’m not inside a git repo, I’m probably editing a config file or doing something quick so kakoune is started without specifying a session.

Here’s a shell script that can be placed in $PATH:

#!/bin/sh

repo=$(echo $(git rev-parse --show-toplevel 2>/dev/null) | sed 's/[^[:alnum:]]//g')
args=

if [ -n "$repo" ]; then
    if kak -l | grep -q "$repo"; then
        args="-c $repo" # join session
    else
        args="-s $repo" # make session
    fi
fi

exec kak $args $@ # launch editor

Here’s a bash function that can be sourced from .bashrc:

function kak-mgr {
    local repo=$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel 2>/dev/null)
    local args='' # empty
    if [[ -n $repo ]]; then
        local session=${repo//[^[:alnum:]]} # strip non-alnum chars
        local regex="\b$session\b"
        if [[ $(/usr/bin/kak -l) =~ $regex ]]; then
            args="-c $session" # join session
        else
            args="-s $session" # make session
        fi
    fi
    /usr/bin/kak $args $@ # launch editor
}

Note: if you alias kak='kak-mgr', make sure to specify the full path to the kak binary, so you don’t recursively call the kak-mgr function.

Thoughts and feedback are welcome. For the bash regex, I couldn’t get "^$session\$" to match a full line, so I had to resort to using the word boundry \b tag. Anyone know why?

2 Likes
2

you can call your function kak and call kakoune inside via command kak this way it is more portable. [[ can be replaced with [ and instead of using bash =~ there’s expr

3

Thanks for the command suggestion. I’ve been trying to keep the stand-alone shell script as POSIX and portable as possible and the bash function as pure bash as possible.

4

ah, got it. I just see everything as POSIX first, then as bash, then as zsh :slight_smile:

1 Like
5

I have a very similar thing here: https://github.com/eraserhd/dotfiles/blob/develop/kak/wrapper/wrapper.sh

findSessionName used to look for the tmux window name, which is how I did it, but I’m trying to move to a single, global session.

It occurred to me that there should be some way to configure this with a strategy name. Maybe an environment variable, or something in ~/.config? In any case, it seems like there should be a way to reuse the bulk of it somehow.

(Also, in your first script, the grep will catch a substring. If you have apache-configs running and you launch in apache directory, it will try to connect to an existing apache.)

6

I use this script:

It has a distinction between a one-terminal session and a session in which every window is a separate terminal. Also, it handles stdin (in a hacky way).
It connects to the global session by default, unless a project specific session is defined in the ENV of the terminal.

7

Thanks. These other implementations are interesting to look at.

8

Worth mentioning this one
https://github.com/alexherbo2/project.kak