What has caused the CTRL + x + e shortcut to stop working in the shell

itermshortcutterminalvisual-studio-codezsh

The CTRL+x+e keyboard shortcut allows you to open your favorite editor, as defined in the $EDITOR shell environment variable.

This has stopped working for me recently, but I am not sure what changed.

I have $EDITOR in my .zshrc set to VS Code like so:

export EDITOR='code'

Previous(Expected) Behavior

Earlier, triggering the above shortcut in zsh on iTerm2:

  1. It would open a tab in an active VS Code window.
  2. It would allow me to type my long command.
  3. I would then close the tab, VS Code would ask if I wanted to save the file, I would click on No and it would return to the zsh tab with the long command already entered.
  4. I just had to press the RETURN key then for running the pasted command.

Actual Behavior:

Now, if I follow the same steps as above, the typed command is no longer entered in the zsh shell, even though the VS Code tab closes.

Environment specs:

macOS Big Sur – 11.2.2

VS Code – 1.55.2

iTerm2 – 3.4.4

zsh – 5.8

Note:

I could replicate the same erroneous behavior on the natively-available Terminal app.

Has anyone else faced this problem? Could someone help please?

Best Answer

The edit-and-execute-command function triggered with Ctrl-x-e uses a temporary file which gets opened in the defined editor. If you want to use/run your changed command(s) afterwards, you must answer YES if prompted to save the file. Otherwise your changes will be lost.

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