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TIL: Integrate Visual Studio Code with Shell / CLI

Jonas Brømsø on October 14, 2018

Up to now I have been using Sublime Text as my preferred editor, before that it was TextMate, before that it was BBEdit and sometimes in between it...

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tux0r • Oct 14 '18

It might be handy to make a difference between $EDITOR and $VISUAL as they have different purposes (which are often ignored - but still there): $EDITOR is for when you can't have a $VISUAL (and even less so, a GUI one).

Jonas Brømsø • Oct 15 '18

I made a little experiment this morning, exchanging $EDITOR for $VISUAL and it works as expected.

I guess the recommendation should be to use $VISUAL for you GUI enabled editor and then define $EDITOR point to a non-gui like vi, nano, vim or similar for hosts where you access via ssh.

Which makes your shell configuration portable, which holds a lot of benefits.

So I ended up with the following:

VISUAL='code --wait --new-window'
EDITOR='/usr/bin/vi'

export VISUAL EDITOR

Thanks for the pointer. I do however wonder where this is documented, would love to know a know authoritative resource. I will update my TIL accordingly.

tux0r • Oct 15 '18 • Edited

Parts of the definition come from POSIX. Even in 2018 when most operating systems skip large parts of POSIX, it could be useful to stick to its recommendations.

Glad to help.

Jonas Brømsø • Oct 15 '18

I find your recommendation much more correct, the more I think about it - thanks again.

My .bash_profile has followed me for many years, glad to learn that I can still improve it.

chenge • Oct 14 '18

On mac, start code in bash.


ln -s /Applications/Visual\ Studio\ Code.app/ codeapp
open codeapp

Jonas Brømsø • Oct 14 '18

You can also use the official approach, described here: code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/mac.

As always, and luckily, there is more than one way to do it :-)

chenge • Oct 14 '18

Cool, more simple. thanks. :)