Open a file in your locally running VS Code instance from any terminal.
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 terminals. 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.
You would have to get to VS Code, connect to your server through a remote session and find the file in VS Code's file browser.
This utility enables you to call code . instead, just as you would in a WSL session.
- a Linux machine you want to run
code-connecton - Python 3 - tested under Python 3.8, but slightly older versions should work fine
- socat - used for pinging UNIX sockets
apt-get install socat
You need to set up VS Code Server 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.
If you are familiar with virtualenv, conda, etc., this will be familiar.
Execute this and place it in your .bashrc
source activate.shFish users can alternatively install an accompanying fish plugin.
fisher install chvolkmann/code-connect-fish-pluginIf you want to do it manually, execute this and place it in your config.fish
source activate.fishFirst, run
code-connectThis will provide you with the code command from your server's VS Code Server installation. It also sets the environment variable VSCODE_IPC_HOOK_CLI to a valid IPC socket.
Then you're free to use
code /path/to/fileNote that you need to have an active instance of VS Code running.
To unlink the code executable and unset the environment variable, use
code-disconnectAnd to disable code-connect and unset the aliases, use
deactivateVS 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 manually attaching a remote SSH session. These sockets can be found in the folder 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 binary can be found in ~/.vscode-server/bin/<commid-id>/bin/code.
A similar method is used to list all of VS Code's IPC sockets, which are located under /run/user/1000/vscode-ipc-<UUID>.sock, where <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.
So the 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_CLIwhich 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/socketThis returns 0 if and only if there's something listening.
The script code_connect.py does all of the above steps and outputs a string to stdout. Currently, output for bash and fish is supported.
Sample output (bash):
export VSCODE_IPC_HOOK_CLI="/run/user/1000/vscode-ipc-dd85cff3-04c7-4ca6-9c06-229acd73008c.sock"
alias code="/home/user/.vscode-server/bin/622cb03f7e070a9670c94bae1a45d78d7181fbd4/bin/code"code-connect is an alias sourcing the output of code_connect.py into the current shell session.
See CHANGELOG.md
- Based on an answer on StackOverflow by stabledog