emacs-vterm and dnd (drag and drop)

[rpaulo]

Some terminals allow you to drag and drop files from the Finder/Nautilus/etc. and the path name will be inserted into the terminal window. If you do this in Emacs (GUI), the file is opened instead.

To overcome this problem, I wrote this function to insert an escaped path name into Emacs when vterm-mode is in use:

(defun rpaulo-dnd-handle-one-url (orig-fun &rest args)
  "Overrides dnd-handle-one-url in vterm-mode so that when
dragging and dropping a file to vterm the entire shell escaped
path name is inserted instead."
  (if (string= major-mode "vterm-mode")
      (let ((window (nth 0 args))
            (action (nth 1 args))
            (text (nth 2 args)))
        (if (string-match "^file:" text)
            (let ((filename (substring text 5)))
              (dnd-insert-text window action (shell-quote-argument filename))
              (vterm-yank))
          (dnd-insert-text window action text)
          (vterm-yank)))
    (apply orig-fun args)))

(advice-add 'dnd-handle-one-url :around #'rpaulo-dnd-handle-one-url)

I think it may be useful for vterm to have an option that implements this functionality. If you don't agree, feel free to close.

P.S.: This proof of concept elisp code doesn't work on Windows and in some operating systems it adds a couple of extra forward slashes in the beginning (but these cause no problems whatsover).