What about detached or unrelated shells and code [args]
support?
While other answers talk about how to configure and use the VScode integrated WSL bash
terminal support, they don't solve the problem of "detached shells": shells which were not launched from within VScode, or which somehow get "disconnected" from the VScode server instance associated with the IDE.
Such shells can give errors like:
Command is only available in WSL or inside a Visual Studio Code terminal.
or...
Unable to connect to VS Code server.
Error in request
Here's a script which makes it easy to solve this problem.
I use this daily to connect shells in a tmux
session with a specific VScode server instance, or to fix an integrated shell that's become detached from its hosting IDE.
#!/bin/bash
# codesrv-connect
#
# Purpose:
# Copies the vscode connection environment from one shell to another, so that you can use the
# vscode integrated terminal's "code [args]" command to communicate with that instance of vscode
# from an unrelated shell.
#
# Usage:
# 1. Open an integrated terminal in vscode, and run codesrv-connect
# 2. In the target shell, cd to the same directory and run
# ". .codesrv-connect", or follow the instruction printed by codesrv-connect.
#
# Setup:
# Put "codesrv-connect somewhere on your PATH (e.g. ~/bin)"
#
# Cleanup:
# - Delete abandoned .codesrv-connect files when their vscode sessions die.
# - Do not add .codesrv-connect files to git repositories.
#
# Notes:
# The VSCODE_IPC_HOOK_CLI environment variable points to a socket which is rather volatile, while the long path for the 'code' alias is more stable: vscode doesn't change the latter even across a "code -r ." reload. But the former is easily detached and so you need a fresh value if that happens. This is what codesrv-connect does: it captures the value of these two and writes them to .codesrv-connect in the current dir.
#
# Verinfo: v1.0.0 - [email protected] - 2020-03-31
#
function errExit {
echo "ERROR: $@" >&2
exit 1
}
[[ -S $VSCODE_IPC_HOOK_CLI ]] || errExit "VSCODE_IPC_HOOK_CLI not defined or not a pipe [$VSCODE_IPC_HOOK_CLI]"
if [[ $(which code) != *vscode-server* ]]; then
errExit "The 'code' command doesn't refer to something under .vscode-server: $(type -a code)"
fi
cat <<EOF >.codesrv-connect
# Temp file created by $(which codesrv-connect): source this into your working shell like '. .codesrv-connect'
# ( git hint: add ".codesrv-connect" to .gitignore )
#
cd "$PWD"
if ! test -S "$VSCODE_IPC_HOOK_CLI"; then
echo "ERROR: $VSCODE_IPC_HOOK_CLI not a socket. Dead session."
else
export VSCODE_IPC_HOOK_CLI="$VSCODE_IPC_HOOK_CLI"
alias code=$(which code)
echo "Done: the 'code' command will talk to socket \"$VSCODE_IPC_HOOK_CLI\" now."
echo "You can delete .codesrv-connect when the vscode server context dies, or reuse it in other shells until then."
fi
EOF
echo "# OK: run this to connect to vscode server in a destination shell:"
echo ". $PWD/.codesrv-connect"