Capture trailing newline in shell expansion.

[enricozb]

If I have a file test.txt with three newlines in it, and I run :reg dquote %sh{cat ~/.clipboard}, the " register is empty. Whereas if I select three newlines in kakoune and yank them with y, and then do :echo %reg{"}, I have ␤␤␤. How can I get these newlines into the register as a result of a shell expansion?

[enricozb]

I realize that subshells automatically trail newlines, and Kakoune has either also decided to do that or is using a POSIX subshell which is trailing the newlines. However, even if I append a dummy x to the end of my shell output to then be "discarded" later won't work because Kakoune has no built-in string manipulation tools.

So I figure some solution with the pipe keys might work, but I can't think of anything at the moment.

[enricozb]

Here is what I ended up with. Hopefully there is a better way to do this...

%sh{
  printf "%s" ": edit -scratch *clip*<ret>";
  printf "%s" "|cat ~/.clipboard<ret>";
  printf "%s" "%Hy";
  printf "%s" ": delete-buffer *clip*<ret>";
}

[Screwtapello]

Can you do something like:

reg dquote %file{/path/to/.clipboard}

I think %file{} expands to the contents of the named file without stripping whitespace; unfortunately it requires an absolute path and doesn't support abbreviations like ~ for $HOME.

[enricozb]

@Screwtapello This is absolutely the right way to do it. If I wanted a relative path I could just do

eval %sh{
  dir=$(echo ~/.clipboard);
  printf "%s" "reg dquote %file{$dir}"
}

Thanks a ton