wezterm/docs/shell-integration.md

Shell Integration

wezterm supports integrating with the shell through the following means:

• OSC 7 Escape sequences to advise the terminal of the working directory
• OSC 133 Escape sequence to define Input, Output and Prompt zones

These sequences enable some improved user experiences, such as being able to spawn new panes, tabs and windows with the same current working directory as the current pane, jumping through the scrollback to the start of an earlier command, or conveniently selecting the complete output from a command.

In order for these features to be enabled, you will need to configure your shell program to emit the escape sequences at the appropriate place.

You can find some examples for various shells in the wezterm repo.

Starting with version 20210314-114017-04b7cedd, the Fedora and Debian packages automatically activate shell integration for Bash and Zsh.

If you're on another system, more information on how these escapes work can be found below.

Learn more about OSC 133 Semantic Prompt Escapes.

OSC 7 Escape sequence to set the working directory

OSC is escape sequence jargon for Operating System Command; OSC 7 means Operating System Command number 7. This is an escape sequence that originated in the macOS Terminal application that is used to advise the terminal of the current working directory.

An application (usually your shell) can be configured to emit this escape sequence when the current directory changes, or just to emit it each time it prints the prompt.

The current working directory can be specified as a URL like this:

printf "\033]7;file://HOSTNAME/CURRENT/DIR\033\\"

When the current working directory has been set via OSC 7, spawning a new tab will use the current working directory of the current tab, so that you don't have to manually change the directory.

If you are on a modern Fedora installation, the defaults for bash and zsh source a vte.sh script that configures the shell to emit this sequence. On other systems you will likely need to configure this for yourself.

OSC 7 on Windows with cmd.exe

cmd.exe doesn't allow a lot of flexibility in configuring the prompt, but fortunately it does allow for emitting escape sequences. You can use the set_environment_variables configuration to pre-configure the prompt environment in your .wezterm.lua; this example configures the use of OSC 7 as well as including the time and current directory in the visible prompt with green and purple colors, and makes the prompt span multiple lines:

return {
  set_environment_variables = {
    prompt = "$E]7;file://localhost/$P$E\\$E[32m$T$E[0m $E[35m$P$E[36m$_$G$E[0m ",
  }
}

OSC 7 on Windows with powershell

You can configure a custom prompt in powershell by creating/editing your powershell profile and defining a function like this:

function prompt {
    $p = $executionContext.SessionState.Path.CurrentLocation
    $osc7 = ""
    if ($p.Provider.Name -eq "FileSystem") {
        $ansi_escape = [char]27
        $provider_path = $p.ProviderPath -Replace "\\", "/"
        $osc7 = "$ansi_escape]7;file://${env:COMPUTERNAME}/${provider_path}${ansi_escape}\"
    }
    "${osc7}PS $p$('>' * ($nestedPromptLevel + 1)) ";
}

Using clink on Windows Systems

Clink brings bash style line editing to your Windows cmd.exe experience. If you haven't installed clink to be the global default on your system, you can configure wezterm to launch clink by setting the default_prog configuration in your .wezterm.lua; for example, if you have extracted clink to c:\clink_0.4.9 you might configure this:

local wezterm = require 'wezterm';

local default_prog;
local set_environment_variables = {}

if wezterm.target_triple == "x86_64-pc-windows-msvc" then
  -- Use OSC 7 as per the above example
  set_environment_variables["prompt"] = "$E]7;file://localhost/$P$E\\$E[32m$T$E[0m $E[35m$P$E[36m$_$G$E[0m "
  -- use a more ls-like output format for dir
  set_environment_variables["DIRCMD"] = "/d"
  -- And inject clink into the command prompt
  default_prog = {"cmd.exe", "/s", "/k", "c:/clink_0.4.9/clink_x64.exe", "inject", "-q"}
end

return {
  default_prog = default_prog,
  set_environment_variables = set_environment_variables,
}

Now, rather than just running cmd.exe on its own, this will cause cmd.exe to self-inject the clink line editor.