Some sharing for other beginners like me when playing around with Wezterm config

[haphamdev]

I have been playing around with Wezterm for more than a week.
I built up my own status bar and key mappings, trying to replicate what I had with tmux before to ensure my workflow was still smooth after migrating from Alacritty to Wezterm. You can find the code in my dot-files.
Now, I just want to write down some of my experiences for other beginners.

For NeoVim users:

Lua coding in NeoVim is a really nice experience. However, I faced the auto-completion issue when configuring Wezterm.
I was using lua_ls for the Language Server.
And my lua config for Wezterm looks like this

wezterm            
├── .luarc.json    
├── colors.lua     
├── keymappings.lua
├── plugins.lua    
├── status-bar.lua 
├── tab-format.lua 
├── utils.lua      
└── wezterm.lua    

There is no special thing there, just follow the instructions from Wezterm docs for Lua configuration, except the .luarc.json file, which is the point of this section.
Inside the entrypoint wezterm.lua, I had to import other lua files.

require("status-bar").apply_to_config(config)
require('tab-format').apply_to_config(config)
require("keymappings").apply_to_config(config)
require("plugins").apply_to_config(config)

However, lua_ls will not recognize those modules, which means I could not jump around the code or no code completion. That was painful.

After checking the config doc or lua_ls, I found a workaround by adding .luarc.json to the wezterm/ directory as you can see in the above directory tree.
Content of .luarc.json:

{
  "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LuaLS/vscode-lua/master/setting/schema.json",
  "workspace.library": ["./wezterm"],
  "runtime.version": "Lua 5.3",
  "hint.enable": true
}

You can see that I added the wezterm directory to the library to solve the issue.
Now I can smoothly configure my Wezterm with NeoVim 👍 💯

Debugging Wezterm Lua configuration

Please read this page if you want to debug your config. I missed that page when I started and struggled with it for 2-3 days before posting a question here

Some helper functions for Wezterm config

You can find some helper function here which were really useful for me

• map: Just like the map function in other languages, it requires in input table, iterates through the table and apply a function on each item to generate an output table. For example: Get a list of names from a list of people.

local names = map(people, function (_, v) return v.name end)

• inspect: Not much here. wezterm.log_info() (or other variants for errors and warnings) is really helpful with text messages. But for Lua table, we need wezterm.to_string() rather than having a bunch of memory addresses on the log output.
• mergeTable: Just to join two Lua arrays. I use it to merge all FormatItems to build the right status bar
• formatSegment: My status bar contains different segments (for git info, current directory, battery info, key layouts). I just want a function to help me format the text.

wezterm.nerdfonts is really useful if you need an icon for your status bar

Check it out

Running a shell command in Wezterm config

In many cases that you want to run a shell command and get the output. For example, checking git status of the current working directory or checking which song is playing by Spotify CLI. It's quite complicated to do that in Lua. Luckily, Wezterm already covered that for us with wezterm.run_child_process(). Check it out.

Btw, background_child_process is also cool.

Configuring your status bar or tab bar

You can configure your status bar by handling the event update-status (or update-right-status which is considered deprecated). For the tab bar, we use format-tab-title event. You can see an example there.

Notes: As you can see from the docs, those events might be triggered multiple times, some of which do not behave as expected. For example, pane:get_current_working_dir() returns unexpected nil. Please ensure that you do the safety check in your code. Something like:

    local cwd = pane:get_current_working_dir()
    if cwd and cwd.file_path then
    else
    end

That's pretty much it for my sharing. Hope you enjoys Wezterm and looking forward to new awesome plugins.