Writefile to /dev/tty stopped working in nvim 0.9

Neovim
1

I’ve been using this snippet for a while…at least since neovim 0.5. I recently updated to HEAD from 0.8 and I’m seeing failures with the following line:

call writefile([escape], '/dev/tty', 'b')

I’m guessing this might be an intentional change as part of the backend separation, but I’d like to confirm that it’s not a bug before trying to find a workaround. Does anyone know why this might have changed in 0.9?

3 Likes
2

I can’t see anything in the breaking changes since Neovim 0.8.

Which is your default shell?

3

shell is bash 4.4 on ubuntu. I can do the following in the same shell without error:

echo "foo" > /dev/tty

…but then the writefile in that function gives:

E482: Can’t open file /dev/tty for writing: no such device or address

so I’m confused.

4

I just tried

:!echo foo > /dev/tty

in Neovim (0.8 and 0.9), and get

warning: An error occurred while redirecting file '/dev/tty'
open: No such device or address

Also,

:!tty

outputs

not a tty

I also found this issue that seems relevant to this.
Maybe the same change has been applied to writefile, too.

5

I’m using the same snippet and just ran into the same issue after updating to nvim 0.9. Did you find any workaround for this?

6

I’ve been using this same code as a way to interact with the clipboard (I run NeoVim on a docker container and SSH into it from Windows, so that’s the only way I found to have clipboard support).

But now the latest versions of my dev container updated to nvim 0.9 and it doesn’t work anymore. Any workaround is welcome.

7

This plugin seems to support the script’s functionality and appears to be actively maintained.

1 Like
8

idk what exactly your “escape sequence” is, but if you change /dev/tty to /proc/self/fd/2 or /proc/self/fd/1, will it work again?

10

same issue here. i switch to a lua “system()”.

local map = function(mode, lhs, rhs, opt)
  opt = opt or {noremap = true, silent = true}
  vim.api.nvim_set_keymap(mode, lhs, rhs, opt)
end

yank = function(reg)
  local f = io.popen('yank', 'w')
  f:write(vim.fn.getreg(reg))
  f:close()
end
map('n', '<c-c>', [[mzV"0y`z:lua yank(0)<cr>]])
map('v', '<c-c>', [["0y:lua yank(0)<cr>]])
map('v', '<c-x>', [["0d:lua yank(0)<cr>]])