New feature: External editor such as vim, helix, etc

[peterwilli]

Hi everyone at Block and Contributors, I began using this tool after testing like 5 different agentic CLI's, and I must say, yours is the best. It's got a vision, a sense of direction that others such as Aider lack. Yet its also experimental, and allows challenging the status quo. Because of this, I'm confident that I'll stick around.

This PR actually started out as an autocomplete feature, but I realized it soon got too difficult. At the end, I decided: Why not augment instead of reinvent?

(Pls be gentle this is my first PR for this project, it comes in good faith and I hope it aligns with your vision)

Love to all, and I hope you have a good weekend.

Summary

While I love editing prompts directly, having a simple CLI-editor makes it difficult to follow along writing longer prompts, and external editors such as neovim, helix, etc. have a lot of cool things such as syntax highlighting, undo history, and language server tools.

If you want to try this, add this to your goose config.yml:

GOOSE_PROMPT_EDITOR: hx/nvim/whatever

Type of Change

• Feature
• Bug fix
• Refactor / Code quality
• Performance improvement
• Documentation
• Tests
• Security fix
• Build / Release
• Other (specify below)

AI Assistance

• This PR was created or reviewed with AI assistance

I followed the HOWTOAI and also reviewed every bit that was created.

Testing

There's unit tests that self-review this change for integrity. Just run cargo test editor to see for yourself.

Related Issues

Relates to #ISSUE_ID
Discussion: LINK (if any)

Screenshots/Demos (for UX changes)

Demo is here: https://asciinema.org/a/757099

Submitting a Recipe?

Email:

[peterwilli]

I have updated this branch, it now places the temp file as a symlink inside your working directory, so that you can directly tag files relative to your project (cross-platform but I dont use Windows so if anyone wants to test feel free).

This way, the file doesnt get written to SSD with every turn, while still benefiting from adding files relative to your project (for example in Helix if you type ./ you get a file picker in-editor).

I also explored other options such as named pipes, but these are more difficult to do consistently and cross-platform.

[alexhancock]

A really cool concept. I like it.

Left a couple suggestions.

If you're up for it I'd like to get them resolved and get this in

[JordanPaoletti]

Hey @peterwilli, this is looking like a great contribution and something I also want for this tool!
A couple of additional suggestions to consider:

In most posix/posixish cli envs, the $EDITOR and/or $VISUAL env var is set to the preferred editor and is often used by other cli apps. It might be a nice quality of life feature to fallback to these vars if set (which tend to be vi by default) and use 'vi' directly if these also aren't set.

On another note, but using kiro-cli at work has gotten me accustomed to their /editor command. This allows the user to jump into the set editor at their discretion if they know they are going to be writing a long prompt or need to do many pastes with editing. But it also allows quick back and forth with jumping into an editor. I'm not sure if goose has any guidelines on what is and isn't allowed as a slash command though.

[DOsinga]

I like both these suggestions. our slash commands aren't in any particularly good shape so I'd be happy to add this

[michaelneale]

hey @peterwilli you still interested in pushing this over the line?

[peterwilli]

Hey I'm back, I'll check out the feedback right now!

[peterwilli]

I have no idea what happened with my merge but somehow it now says I'm 250 commits behind. I think that its because I had some issues doing a merge and a signoff commit. I'll check back later today to fix this part by manually going back to main and put the change back in

[peterwilli]

All feedback has been handled!

[alexhancock]

@peterwilli Thanks for the contribution!

[peterwilli]

Omg my first Goosecontribution! Thanks so much!