How to execute a vim command after a task is finished?

[n0bra1n3r]

Is there a way to run a vim command after finishing a task? Or alternatively, is there a way to define a task that is a vim command? The specific usecase is to run a vim command to perform a hot reload on a running Flutter app after a code-generation task is finished.

[stevearc]

Currently tasks have to be external processes, but there are multiple ways to run a command after finishing a task.

1. You can add a subscriber to the task

task:subscribe("on_complete", function(task, status)
  if status == require("overseer").STATUS.SUCCESS then
    -- hot reload
  end
end)

This is very simple, but the downside is that there aren't great affordances for getting the task reference. There are template hooks for adjusting the arguments to a task, and your custom templates also declare their own task arguments, but there are not as many ways to retrieve the task reference once it has been launched. The other downside is that this is getting added as a function, which isn't serializable. That means that saving/loading the task to a bundle or via a session plugin will cause the callback to get lost.

2. You could create a custom component called on_complete_hot_reload or similar. The component would define an on_complete handler and perform the hot reloading logic. This is a bit more boilerplate (you have to create a new file to define the component), but it works with all the serialization and is easy to add in templates, hooks, the task editor, etc.

[n0bra1n3r]

Thank you! What I ended up doing was creating a wrapper around neovim's remote API that executes vim commands inside the current vim session. It's very convenient since I can manage both vim and external tasks from one spot, and treat both task types the same way. For reference the task definition looks something like:

  return {
    args = {
      '--clean',
      '--headless',
      '--server',
      vim.v.servername,
      '--remote-expr',
      'v:lua.task_cb_runner('.._G.task_cb_id..')',
    },
    cmd = { vim.v.progpath },
    components = {
      deps,
      'on_exit_set_status',
    },
    name = name,
  }

[stevearc]

Oh, I wouldn't have thought of that. Really cool!