Kakoune Chronicles I

I had two separate, nearly identical Kakoune scripts to open a new terminal in either Sway or tmux and connect to the session.* In other words, for making splits and tabs, panes and windows, or whatever else you might call them.

define-command vsplit -params .. -command-completion \
    -docstring "vsplit [<commands>]: new vertical split" %{
    sway-terminal-vertical kak -c %val{session} -e "%arg{@}"
}

All I had to do was comment out the line that sources the one not being used in my kakrc. Both use the same names for the commands so my keybinds don’t need to change.

# using tmux
source "%val{config}/utils/tmux.kak"
# source "%val{config}/utils/sway.kak"

This is obviously a horrible solution. You could load them conditionally at the cost of a subshell, but this is unnecessary.

For one, Kakoune’s system scripts already do this to auto-detect the windowing environment. The new command will work in tmux, sway, even the macOS Terminal.app. You can use the same idea to define the proper command automatically.

Inspecting new, you’ll see that it uses the terminal command to determine the preferred terminal emulator. terminal creates a new terminal window based on the detected windowing environment. A program with optional arguments must be passed, for example sh, to run in the window.

Actually, terminal is more of an alias for the specific commands provided by Kakoune’s windowing detection. When you execute terminal, you are actually just executing:

"%opt{windowing_module}-terminal-%opt{windowing-placement}"

The solution to combining the two windowing utilities is as easy as using the windowing_module option in the command as done in terminal.

define-command hsplit -params .. -command-completion \
    -docstring "hsplit [<commands>]: new horizontal split" %{
    "%opt{windowing_module}-terminal-horizontal" \
    kak -c %val{session} -e "%arg{@}"
}

It is worth noting that Kakoune does not auto-detect multiple/nested windowing environments. For example, if you use tmux in Sway, you do not have access to the sway-terminal-* commands automatically, but only those from tmux. However, you can manually load them with require-module sway. This opens up possibilities for some pretty complicated and unnecessary windowing plugins.