Pipe to Shell

Leverage your favourite shell commands to edit text.

• Pipe to Shell
• Features
• Enter a command
• History
• Shell configuration
• Environment variables
• Working directory
• Favorite commands
• Keyboard Shortcuts
• Audit & Debug
• Changelog
• Request Features or Report Bugs
• Credit

Features

• Edit the selected text by piping it through shell commands
• Insert the output of shell commands at the cursor position
• Records command history: you can edit and reuse past commands
• Highly configurable: shell preference, env vars and many more
• Support multi cursors

Enter a command

PipeToShell: Run command in-place and PipeToShell: Run command to new editor show a command input with suggestions. The input allows to enter a new command or modify an existing suggestion.

Command IDs: pipeToShell.runCommandInPlace / pipeToShell.runCommandNewEditor.

By clicking the OK button or pressing Enter, the entered command is run.

The suggestions are made of the previous run commands (marked with ) and the favorite commands (marked with ).

By clicking or pressing Space on a suggestion, the command is set in the prompt to be further modified.

By pressing Enter on a suggestion, that command is run immediately.

By default all suggestions are shown but it is possible to customize it with the buttons at the top:

• : Hide/Show history suggestions (Ctrl+H)
• : Hide/Show favorite suggestions (Ctrl+F)

It is also possible to customize the execution:

• : Change target In-place/New-editor (Ctrl+N). The default value is based on the command run.

• : Save the command in history (Ctrl+S)

• : When selected process file content if no text is selected (Ctrl+G)

  The initial value is defined by pipeToShell.processEntireTextIfNoneSelected configuration

The checkboxes are VScode API limitations, they are meaningless and should be ignored.

History

The history size is controlled by pipeToShell.historyMaxSize. It is persistent over an IDE restart.

The history can be cleared with PipeToShell: Clear Command History (Command ID: pipeToShell.clearCommandHistory)

Shell configuration

You can adjust the configuration to use your preferred shell with specific args.

• pipeToShell.shell.linux (default: "/bin/sh")

  The path of the shell that this extension uses on Linux

• pipeToShell.shellArgs.linux (default: ["-c"])

  Arguments to the shell to be used on Linux

• pipeToShell.shell.osx (default: "/bin/sh")

  The path of the shell that this extension uses on macOS

• pipeToShell.shellArgs.osx (default: ["-c"])

  Arguments to the shell to be used on macOS

• pipeToShell.shell.windows (default: "cmd.exe")

  The path of the shell that this extension uses on Windows

  • For PowerShell, you may set this to "pwsh"
  • For Bash on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), you may set this to "wsl"

• pipeToShell.shellArgs.windows (default: ["/d", "/s", "/c"])

  Arguments to the shell to be used on Winows

  • For PowerShell, you may set this to ["-NoLogo", "-NoProfile", "-Command"]
  • For Bash on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), you may set this to ["bash", "-c"]

Environment variables

By default, the env vars are inherited from the VScode process running the extension.

A few extra env vars are added by the extension:

• file: Absolute path to the file (if not untitled)
• fileWorkspaceFolder: workspace folder the file belongs (if has one)
• relativeFile: file path relative to fileWorkspaceFolder (if has one)

If the provided command is referencing selectedText then the text selection is passed through this env var instead of stdin.

Additional custom env vars can defined in pipeToShell.shell.env setting:

{
    "PATH": "/some/path"
}

Working directory

The current directory for shell commands can be customized with pipeToShell.currentDirectoryKind (default: "currentFile").

1. currentFile: If the target directory is not available, HOME directory will be used.
2. workspaceRoot: The workspace root where the file belongs. If none, the root of the first folder in the workspace. If not available, the home directory.

Favorite commands

List of commands that are always shown in the suggestions and that may also be used with keyboard shortcuts.

You can define them in the configuration pipeToShell.favoriteCommands. Each element must have an ID and command. An additional nice name can be added.

"pipeToShell.favoriteCommands": [
    {
        "id": "extract-email-and-sort-on-address-book",
        "command": "cut -d, -f3 | sort"
    },
    {
        "id": "insert-melbourne-time",
        "command": "TZ=Australia/Melbourne date '+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S'",
        "name": "Insert Melbourne Time"
    },
    ...
]

Keyboard Shortcuts

Open prompt

You can quickly open a command input box by registering the extension command to your keyboard shortcut settings. For example:

{
    "key": "ctrl+r ctrl+r", 
    "command": "pipeToShell.runCommandInPlace",
    "when": "editorTextFocus && !editorReadonly"
}

Run a specific command

By using pipeToShell.quickCommand:

{
    "key": "ctrl+shift+;",
    "command": "pipeToShell.quickCommand",
    "when": "editorTextFocus",
    "args": "beautify_json"
}

If the args is a favourite command id, then the related command is run else the provided command is run:

{
    "key": "ctrl+shift+;",
    "command": "pipeToShell.quickCommand",
    "when": "editorTextFocus",
    "args": "jq -c"
}

It is also possible to customize the execution:

{
    "key": "ctrl+shift+[",
    "command": "pipeToShell.quickCommand",
    "when": "editorTextFocus",
    "args": {
        "command": "jq -c",
        "shouldOpenNewEditor": false,
        "shouldSaveCommand": true,
        "shouldProcessEntireText": true,
    }
}

command is required and behaves as args when a string. All the other parameters are optional. The default values are the ones listed above except shouldProcessEntireText that is defined by the extension setting.

Audit & Debug

There is a Pipe to Shell channel in the Output.

The following elements can be configured to be logged (locally) on success pipeToShell.logging.success.XXX and/or failure pipeToShell.logging.failure.XXX in the settings:

• Command: Always true by default
• Stdin: Always false by default
• Stdout: Only in failure by default
• Stderr: Only in failure by default
• Env vars: Always false by default
• Cwd: Only in failure by default

The datetime of the execution is also logged.

Changelog

https://github.com/morikko/vscode-pipe-to-shell/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

Request Features or Report Bugs

Feature requests and bug reports are welcome: https://github.com/morikko/vscode-pipe-to-shell/issues

• Reporting a bug: Please include as much environment information (OS name/version, the editor version) and steps on how to reproduce it.

• Requesting a feature: Please try to provide the context of why you want the feature. I am not encline to complicate the extension for little benefit or obscur use cases.

Credit

This extension is a fork from Edit with Shell Command extension and greatly inspired by Filter Text extension.