TIL: psql with VSCode

I was catching up on my Feedly yesterday and ran across Postgres Hidden Gems by Craig Kerstein. There are some really neat things in that list! One thing that caught my eye was this one:

@l_avrot – The fact that we can use vim editor in psql

Really? I didn’t know that. Tell me more. So I Googled a bit and of course another post from Craig titled How I Work With Postgres – Psql, My PostgreSQL Admin popped up. Here, he explains how to use \e in psql to “allow you to view and edit your last run query in your editor of choice”. That sounds really useful, especially when working with longer, more involved queries.

My “editor of choice” is VSCode and when I attempted to use \e with my EDITOR var set to “code” it did not work. The current query was not passed to VSCode and when saving the file from VSCode, nothing got sent back to psql.

More Googling and fiddling and I found that I needed to add the -w parameter when launching VSCode so that it would “Wait for the files to be closed before returning.”, per the --help output. Also, I learned that you can use PSQL_EDITOR to set the editor specific to psql, which I prefer because I like keeping EDITOR set to vim for varios shell things. Editing SQL, however, I would much prefer to do in VSCode rather than vim, thank you very much. So, now I have the following environment variable defined in my .zshrc:

export PSQL_EDITOR="code -w"

Now when I enter \e from psql, VSCode launches with the contents of my current or last executed query and saving the file results in psql executing the query. Awesome!