On-demand terminal window

[stag-enterprises]

Unless I've missed something, currently helix-ghost needs to be open 24/7 in a terminal window (or at the very least, whenever you want to use it). It would be nice to have the process spawn a new terminal window with the editor, instead of running it in the current, allowing it to run in the background without a terminal.

I've worked around this with a Perl script, for I do not know Go. It listens on the port for connections, spawns helix-ghost in a terminal, proxies the connection, and terminates it when it's finished. As a result it can be ran in the background.

Having this be a native feature would be cool though.

[rahji]

I'm not sure I understand. Why is it better to have this Perl script running all the time, waiting to start helix-ghost, versus just having helix-ghost running? I guess the idea is that the Perl script is running as a daemon without a terminal attached to it(?) but it still seems a little Rube Goldberg-esque.

It might make sense for you to try to implement the whole thing in Perl and skip helix-ghost altogether - it looks like you're almost there. The nice thing about a Go version is that it runs on anything from a single binary. I love the olden days of Perl (I taught it for Sun Microsystems as a trainer for years in the 90's) but I probably wouldn't use it for this considering it requires that the user to first install the interpreter and the modules - and I have to imagine what you're doing in the script (forking, killing, etc) won't work on every operating system (namely Windows)

[stag-enterprises]

@rahji Basically, the current helix-ghost needs to run in an actual terminal window, otherwise it doesn't have anywhere to launch the editor. With my script, it can run in the background without a terminal and only launches one when needed. So the result is that you don't have to keep a terminal always open. This is very nice especially on a tiling WM since you can't really just hide a window in the background.

[rahji]

Got it. I assume the script runs via systemd or something. I like the idea - it will exclude windows users though.

[stag-enterprises]

Yes, I was asking to see if this functionality could be added natively, since it's kinda a jank setup right now. I don't imagine it would be terribly difficult, just spawn a terminal instead of an editor directly.