Opening file in emacs buffer when using vterm

Question

My current workflow is often to do things in a terminal and open/change relevant files in a text editor. Transitioning from VSCode to Emacs I am looking for a similar workflow that I got used to when using VSCode. One of these things was navigating my directories in a VSCode terminal to search for the relevant file and simply opening it in the editor, i.e. code file.txt, and proceed to make changes.

I experienced a similar workflow using Emacs term, where I could simply navigate my folders and use C-x C-f (or rather C-c C-f when in the term-buffer) to open file as it defaulted to the current directory of term. However, when trying out vterm as I needed a better terminal emulato, I found that C-x C-f does not default to the current directory in vterm. This means that I have to manually navigate to the file I want to open in Emacs, which can be quite cumbersome.

Is there a way to configure vterm to export the current directory to the find-file functionality of Emacs? Or should I use term for simple directory navigation and vterm for more complex terminal emulation?

Answer 1

The README shipped with vterm describes how to do this in detail by sending special escape sequences in your prompt.

Cribbed from there:

vterm_printf(){
    if [ -n "$TMUX" ] && ([ "${TERM%%-*}" = "tmux" ] || [ "${TERM%%-*}" = "screen" ] ); then
        # Tell tmux to pass the escape sequences through
        printf "\ePtmux;\e\e]%s\007\e\\" "$1"
    elif [ "${TERM%%-*}" = "screen" ]; then
        # GNU screen (screen, screen-256color, screen-256color-bce)
        printf "\eP\e]%s\007\e\\" "$1"
    else
        printf "\e]%s\e\\" "$1"
    fi
}

vterm_prompt_end(){
    vterm_printf "51;A$(whoami)@$(hostname):$(pwd)"
}
PS1=$PS1'\[$(vterm_prompt_end)\]'