Embedded terminal in IntelliJ IDEA (xkeysnail, ubuntu 20.04)

[Mahoney]

Hi,

I'm hoping I can contribute some stuff back, but at the moment I'm very raw on understanding this stuff...

IntelliJ IDEA has an embedded terminal, which is quite useful because it opens in the root directory of the current project, and you can also open arbitrary project directories in it.

However, at present things that work in the "real" terminal don't work in the embedded one - noticeably ctrl-c for SIGINT, ctrl-a for start of line, ctrl-e for end of line, alt left/right arrow for move one word.

Is that even a solvable problem? The special casing of terminal apps seems to rely on their window handle, so it's hard to see how it would work when the terminal is only part of the application's functionality.

[Mahoney]

Related - I've created an IntelliJ keymap which basically takes their macOS one and swaps meta for ctrl wherever they occur. Does that sound like the right approach? It works, mostly.

[rbreaves]

Related - I've created an IntelliJ keymap which basically takes their macOS one and swaps meta for ctrl wherever they occur. Does that sound like the right approach? It works, mostly.

I think you got it right - considering the GUI layout for Kinto is actually this on the left side Super (Meta), Alt, Ctrl versus macs Ctrl, Alt, Cmd (Meta).

If you were to take the Ctrl key keymaps in your IDE and then create xkeysnail translations to go from Super (Meta) -> Ctrl then yes that would fix all of your keymaps for that particular app. And I would be happy to merge those changes into master.

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As far as the embedded terminal goes I am still needing to do some tests to see if this 2nd comment about using FocusIn and FocusOut is an option..

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/480052/how-do-i-detect-whether-my-terminal-has-focus-in-the-gui-from-a-shell-script

I will essentially need some type of trigger to run a simple perl command against /tmp/kinto/xkeysnail/kinto.py as that is where the keymap resides while xkeysnail is running (the permanent master copy is in your ~/.config/kinto/kinto.py location and only loads when the service first begins). The perl command can quickly turn on or off the keymap needed for Terminals or GUI apps.

The design was purposeful because I had always planned to modify the keymap in real time when needed. Although some additional changes need to occur - inotify needs to be moved inside of xkeysnail instead of restart that program. There's more delay involved in restart xkeysnail for a keymap changes than what I would like - and unlike my prior xkbmap it could also lead to keys sticking. I say all that to say - even with a good trigger in place for using a terminal in an app I still need to update xkeysnail to reload the file natively inside of itself. That's the only way to ensure keys will not stick and that the transition is seamless.

#32 (comment)

[rbreaves]

@Mahoney I have now added IntelliJ remap support for Windows and Linux within the master branch of Kinto.

Come to find out detecting the terminal may not be needed because we can still remap the Super (physical Ctrl key as needed for the key terminal hotkeys, not as nice as switching to the terminal keymap but good enough imo). I will be closing this ticket but if you believe it needs more terminal functionality or anything else under IntelliJ then just let me know.

[Mahoney]

Fantastic, thanks!

Sorry, not had much time to follow up on any of this recently.