Support "GitLab-specific references" passed via CLI?

[claytonrcarter]

GL supports many different special "references" in markdown. These are the shortcuts like #number to refer to an issue or !number to refer to an MR. Although it doesn't come up super often, there are semi-regular cases where I want to paste something into the cli like lab mr b <paste> but my clipboard includes the !. As we've already documented, I'm lazy and I think it would be really great of lab was able to deal w/ something like lab mr show !123.

Although there are many different shorthand references, I suspect that supporting issues and MRs would cover most of the use-cases.

This could be as simple as an update to https://github.com/zaquestion/lab/blob/73bada27582bcc013e301e2f419350ac72f4dd6e/cmd/util.go#L290-L306 that strips the first char of an arg if it happens to be [#!], or it could be more robust where an error is thrown if, eg, we try call lab mr b #123 (ie I try to browse to an MR but give an issue ref).

If there's interest in this, I can take a whack at it. If the add'l "you're trying to browse to a mr but you passed an issue" is desired, that might extend beyond the scope of my abilities, though.

[fmuellner]

I want to paste something into the cli like lab mr b <paste>

A simple paste won't work, because without escaping, both # and ! are interpreted by the shell before the argument reaches lab.

I'm not sure how much of a showstopper that is - on the one hand, adding quotes or \ still seems easier than stripping the prefix, on the other hand it can be a bit confusing if you aren't aware of the issue:

$ lab issue show #123
2022/04/08 01:01:48 ERROR: issue_show.go:35: Specify <id> of issue to be show

[claytonrcarter]

Oh, of course. I hadn't thought of that! Good call.

This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, though. It looks like different shells handle these differently: bash won't natively pass #100 or !100, zsh will pass #100 but not !100, and fish (my shell, fwiw) will not pass #100 but will pass !100. (I tried these out w/ echo #100 and echo !100; maybe there's something else I'm missing, though.)

In general, double-click on macOS will select just the digits w/o the prefix, so I can easily copy/paste a single MR/issue id w/o the prefix. The specific use case that spurred me to open the issue was copying a preexisting list of MRs in !123 !456 !789 format and I wanted to grep some info out of mr show for each of them. I used for mr in <paste>; mr show $mr | grep ... ; end but had to manually strip the ! for each. (Oh, the chore!) Something like pbpaste | xargs -n 1 lab mr b {} comes to mind as well to be able to open a new tab for each MR in a list; I think that xargs would skip the shell interpretation.

Anyway, just more fodder for discussion. Thanks for considering!

[claytonrcarter]

Tinkering tinkering ... I played w/ this and it seems like strings.TrimLeft(args[1], "#!") was enough to make it work. So even if it's not useful for the project ... it's easy enough for me to keep it patched locally. 😄

[fmuellner]

Thanks for considering!

Oh, it's not up to me to consider the issue, I was only commenting from the sidelines :joy: (while being sympathetic to the suggestion)