code-connect

Open a file in your locally running Visual Studio Code instance from arbitrary terminal connections.

Motivation

VS Code supports opening files with the terminal using code /path/to/file. While this is possible in WSL sessions and remote SSH sessions if the integrated terminal is used, it is currently not possible for arbitrary terminal sessions.

Say, you have just SSH'd into a remote server using your favorite terminal and would like to open a webserver config file in your local VS Code instance. So you type code nginx.conf, which doesn't work in this terminal. If you try to run code nginx.conf in the integrated terminal however, VS Code opens the file just fine.

The aim of this project is to make the code cli available to any terminal, not only to VS Code's integrated terminal.

Prerequisites

• Linux - we make assumptions on where VS Code stores its data based on Linux

  Macs could also support everything out of the box, confirmation needed. Please don't hesitate to come into contact if you have any information to share.

• Python 3

  Tested under Python 3.6 and Python 3.8, but should work fine in Python 3.5 or newer.

• socat - used for pinging UNIX sockets

  apt-get install socat

Visual Studio Code Server

You need to set up the server component of VS Code on the machine before using this utility. For this, connect to your target in a remote SSH session.

Afterwards, you should have a folder .vscode-server in your home directory.

Installation

Fish

Installing

With fisher

fisher install chvolkmann/code-connect

This downloads code_connect.py along with two functions. See functions/code.fish and functions/code-connect.fish

You can autocomplete the repository name in subsequent commands, e.g. fisher update code<TAB>

Updating

fisher update chvolkmann/code-connect

Uninstalling

fisher remove chvolkmann/code-connect

Bash

Installing & Updating

With bash/install.sh

curl -sS https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chvolkmann/code-connect/main/bash/install.sh | bash

This downloads code_connect.py along with two scripts and sets up aliases in your .bashrc for you. See bash/code.sh and bash/code-connect.sh

Uninstalling

With bash/uninstall.sh

curl -sS https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chvolkmann/code-connect/main/bash/uninstall.sh | bash

Deletes the aliases from ~/.bashrc and removes the folder ~/.code-connect

Usage

Use code as you would normally!

If you have VS Code installed on your remote machine as well (i.e. a code executable already exists), you can use code for your local instance and code-connect for an IPC connected instance.

Usage: code [options][paths...]

To read from stdin, append '-' (e.g. 'ps aux | grep code | code -')

Options
  -d --diff <file> <file>           Compare two files with each other.
  -a --add <folder>                 Add folder(s) to the last active window.
  -g --goto <file:line[:character]> Open a file at the path on the specified line and character position.
  -n --new-window                   Force to open a new window.
  -r --reuse-window                 Force to open a file or folder in an already opened window.
  -w --wait                         Wait for the files to be closed before returning.
  -h --help                         Print usage.

Troubleshooting
  -v --version Print version.
  -s --status  Print process usage and diagnostics information.

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md

How it works

VS Code Remote under the hood

VS Code uses datagram sockets to communicate between a terminal and the rendering window.

The integrated terminal as well as the WSL terminal spawn an IPC socket. You also create one when connecting through a remote SSH session. These sockets can be found in the folders of VS Code Server.

Each time you connect remotely, the VS Code client instructs the server to fetch the newest version of itself. All versions are stored by commit id in ~/.vscode-server/bin. code-connect uses the version that has been most recently accessed. The corresponding code executable can be found in ~/.vscode-server/bin/<commit-id>/bin/remote-cli/code.

A similar method is used to list all of VS Code's IPC sockets, which are located under /run/user/<userid>/vscode-ipc-<UUID>.sock, where <userid> is the current user's UID and <UUID> is a unique ID. VS Code does not seem to clean up all stale connections, so some of these sockets are active, some are not.

Thus the first socket that is listening and that was accessed within a timeframe of 4 hours by default is chosen.

VS Code communicates the presence of an active IPC connection with the environment variable VSCODE_IPC_HOOK_CLI which stores the path to the socket.

You can verify this by opening a connection to your remote machine. In one case, you use VS Code's integrated terminal. In the other case, you use any other terminal.

Run

echo $VSCODE_IPC_HOOK_CLI

which displays an output in the integrated terminal, but not on the other one.

In order, every socket is checked to see if it is listening. For this, the following snippet based on this answer on StackOverflow was used.

socat -u OPEN:/dev/null UNIX-CONNECT:/path/to/socket

This returns 0 if and only if there's something listening.

code-connect under the hood

The script code_connect.py performs all of the above steps and runs the VS Code code executable as a child process with VSCODE_IPC_HOOK_CLI set properly, making it a drop-in replacement for code.

When we already have a code executable available, we don't need to search for it ourselves using code_connect.py. So we introduce two more scripts:

• code-connect
  Direct alias to code_connect.py
• code
  Checks whether there is a code executable locally installed already and tries to use it if available. Otherwise, code-connect will be used.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md

Credit

• Based on an answer on StackOverflow by stabledog