[Feat]: allow code cli to read from stdin as the vscode one

[felipecrs]

What is your suggestion?

The code cli which comes with the VS Code's own server implementation (like Remote - WSL or Remote - Containers) allows the following:

echo 'text from stdout' | code -

Code_H4dwcVrXAz.mp4

code-server's code cli fails with:

$ echo 'text from stdout' | code -
[2022-10-24T15:13:30.253Z] error Unknown option -

Why do you want this feature?

It's very useful so I can use the editor to analyze output of long-running commands like docker logs -f.

Are there any workarounds to get this functionality today?

I tried but I did not find any.

Are you interested in submitting a PR for this?

No plans.

[code-asher]

Ah I think the name is code-server in our case. I tested echo 'text from stdout' | code-server - (in the integrated terminal) and it seems to work.

[felipecrs]

Interesting. So, why there are two CLIs then?

[code-asher]

I am not sure actually...I did not think we included any scripts called `code`. What do you get for `which code`?

[felipecrs]

Ops, actually it's just a symlink to code-server:

ln -s /usr/local/lib/code-server/bin/code-server /usr/local/bin/code

This is done by the image I'm using.

And, that's very weird, see:

❯ echo hi | code-server -
Reading from stdin via: /tmp/code-stdin-U2j
^C
❯ echo hi | code -
[2023-02-28T00:10:43.853Z] error Unknown option -

code-server indeed works but just code doesn't. I can't imagine why that's the case, so I decided to instead of using a symlink, to use a shim instead:

#!/bin/sh

exec code-server "${@}"

And now it works.

[felipecrs]

Maybe there is something wrong with the code-server CLI which makes it does not work if called from a symlink named just code, but I think the workaround is pretty acceptable.

[code-asher]

Ahhhhh I see, so there is the main script which launches the main code-server process and manages VS Code (this one is written by us): ``` /usr/local/lib/code-server/bin/code-server ``` And then there is the internal code-server script used in the integrated terminal (this one is written by Microsoft): ``` /usr/local/lib/code-server/lib/vscode/bin/remote-cli/code-server ``` The two scripts overlap in some ways but have some differences unfortunately. I think there is an issue somewhere to delegate to Microsoft's script rather than try re-implementing everything since we miss things like this.

[code-asher]

Here it is: #5414, the issue name mentions external terminals but it would fix this as well going to rename it