Run vim commands inside yazi.nvim

[sohanemon]

This command functions effectively in Neovim when yazi.nvim is not open. Is there a method to execute this command while yazi.nvim is open, or to achieve similar functionality using a different key mapping/yazi plugin while yazi.nvim is open? Or can I use vim apis inside yazi plugins?

[mikavilpas]

Hmm I'm afraid right now there is no way (currently in use) to execute code in neovim. Sending commands from yazi to neovim is a bit problematic - I think we briefly discussed this a couple of days ago in some issue.

I think it might work in principle by making yazi run a shell command, which would tell neovim to execute some lua code.

When yazi.nvim runs yazi, it automatically gets an environment variable NVIM which is a socket file connected to the parent neovim process. It can be used to communicate with neovim, so technically all remote code execution is always available.

However, this has not been done before, although some point I would like to have a yazi side plugin ("nvim.yazi") that can offer deeper integration with yazi and remove these technical restrictions.

If you are willing to have an nvim-only keymapping, you could add one similar to <c-\> here

[mikavilpas]

I also have another idea that might work for your use case 🙂

hold on a bit

[mikavilpas]

Ok, I added a way to get the nvim current working directory to be available to yazi keymappings. I added an example of using it here in my own config feat(yazi): gr uses NVIM_CWD when available

[sxyazi]

If it's just communication from Yazi ==> yazi.nvim, maybe DDS would be more convenient.

With a key press in Yazi, run a shell command:

{ on = '<C-t>', run = 'shell "ya pub my-message" --confirm' }

And if the user has registered an event for that my-message kind in yazi.nvim it will be triggered

[mikavilpas]

Oh that's a great idea - I can't believe I forgot about that possibility. I'll implement support for that later, I think. 👍🏻

[sohanemon]

Ok, I added a way to get the nvim current working directory to be available to yazi keymappings. I added an example of using it here in my own config feat(yazi): gr uses NVIM_CWD when available

Thanks so much for adding that feature! It's really helpful to have the current working directory in Yazi key mappings. Great work!

[mikavilpas]

Ok, I implemented support for this today. I also implemented a pretty cool integration test setup for this, which I'm happy about 🙂

@sxyazi If you don't mind, I would like to ask a question for clarification. I could not get sending the event with ya pub MyMessageNoData to work as a yazi keybinding - only ya pub-to 0 ... works.

[[manager.prepend_keymap]]
on = "<C-e>"
run = """shell 'ya pub MyMessageNoData 2>&1 > ~/Desktop/output.txt' --confirm"""

Do you think I might have misunderstood something, or could this be a bug of some kind?

edit: the commands that worked can be seen here https://github.com/mikavilpas/yazi.nvim/blob/f8a1f1a5905e5a724ff90f2e2e7d11d246ac11d6/integration-tests/test-environment/.config/yazi/keymap.toml

[sxyazi]

Ah, you're right, it should be ya pub-to instead of ya pub here. Sorry I forgot that yazi.nvim uses ya sub instead of yazi --local-events because of nvim's limitations.

ya pub is only used locally – that is, for the current Yazi process. When using ya sub, it acts as a separate client subscribing to all remote events, so ya pub-to is needed.