KakEdit

Make calls to $EDITOR act upon an existing Kakoune instance.

Disclaimer

You should be using connect.kak.

Why

Mainly for fun and getting back at writing Go code. Also, leveraging client-server architecture for a text editor is still underrated.

Build & test

See Makefile.

Usage

• Make sure kak_session and kak_client environment variables are defined.
• Run kakedit PROGRAM. This project was mainly written with broot(1) in mind.

This will run the given program and replace $EDITOR (and $VISUAL) with something that will send an edit command to an existing Kakoune client.

Optionally, kakwrap will look for a session name in a .kaksession file located inside current directory.

How it works

kakedit

Start listening to a socket and run the program given as argument. $EDITOR is replaced by kakpipe <socket> and this will make subsequent $EDITOR invocations just write the filename to the socket. The running server will catch that filename and send an edit command to an existing Kakoune instance.

kakpipe

The first argument is the path to a socket and all the remaining arguments form a string that is written to the socket.

kakwrap

Start a new Kakoune client inside an existing session that is unique for each directory. If the session does not exist yet, start it too.

Recommended tweaks

• Make Broot open all files in $EDITOR.
• Tweak Kakoune runtime to forward kak_client and kak_session to the windowing system. This makes :terminal kakedit become the fun bit.

See also

The infamous connect.kak is much better in (almost) every aspect. It's too big for my use cases and I prefer a single binary over a collection of runtime scripts.