How can I edit crontabs in VS Code?

Question

If I try to use Visual Studio Code (on macOS 10.15) to edit my crontab, it opens an empty file without the contents of my crontab.

$ VISUAL='code' crontab -e
crontab: no changes made to crontab

I didn't actually expect this to work (without -w) but include it for completeness. But when I add the -w it still fails.

$ VISUAL="code -w" crontab -e
crontab: code -w: No such file or directory
crontab: "code -w" exited with status 1

It occurred to me that there may be some weirdness with quoting, but neither single quotes nor the following fixed anything:

$ function codew() {
function> code -w "$1"
function> }
$ export VISUAL='codew'
$ crontab -e

The problem seems to be that the crontab's tempfile is not actually present. But how do I solve this? How can I use VS Code to edit crontabs?

Answer 1

1. Create a file touch ~/code-wait.sh:

#!/bin/bash
OPTS=""
if [[ "$1" == /tmp/* ]]; then
    OPTS="-w"
fi

/usr/local/bin/code ${OPTS:-} -a "$@"

2. Make this file executable:

chmod 755 ~/code-wait.sh 

3. Add to your .bashrc or .bash_profile or .zshrc:

export VISUAL=~/code-wait.sh
export EDITOR=~/code-wait.sh

4. Run command:

EDITOR='code' crontab -e