Kakoune Invoke Shell Program on Buffer

Feb 5, 2019

I seldom use the text editor kakoune. But many of the features that I have found with vim or neovim for that matter in the past, have finally been implemented on this editor.

It is, however, one of the best modal editors currently in development and I encourage anyone who may be interested on the modality of these sort of editors, to try it out.

I wanted to see how well this editor handled key mappings to invoke a command from within the shell.

The map keys doc which can be found at mapping.ascii specifies that map [switches] <scope> <mode> <key> <keys> would be the recomme nded way to map a key to the desired parameter.

Further googling about this issue, led me to a post at how to execute shell commands with the current filename in which a user asked for a similar configuration on the kakrc initialization file to invoke a command within the shell for the current buffer.

But unfortunately the suggested recommendation for a latex file in this case, would not work.

At the very least, the WinSetOption variable must have a normal mode to which the key is mapped to.

So the correct way to map the key would be

 map global normal <c-x> ':w<ret> $ latex $kak_buffile'

In that case, ctrl and x are bound to save the file and invoke the shell command.

If other options are needed then specify it accordingly

References

kakoune mapping

Kakoune normal mode commands ::: ::: :::