wildwildws

A better way to wrangle websockets

What?

wildwildws (pronounced "Wild Wild Wess") is a Vim plugin inspired by vial-http that lets you establish and maintain a Websocket connection from the comfort of a Vim buffer. wildwildws supports sending HTTP headers with the initial request, and any paragraph in the buffer can be sent as text to the connection, with responses echo'd in a separate window.

How?

First, install with your favorite method. You'll also need wildwildws-d, which is available via npm. I like vim-plug, which can do both:

Plug 'dhleong/vim-wildwildws', {'do': 'npm i -g wildwildws-d'}

Once installed, you can either create a file that ends in .wwws, or pass an url to the :WWWS command, which will do a tiny bit of setup for you:

:WWWS ws://demos.kaazing.com/echo

Either way, your .wwws file needs to contain a line that looks like this:

URI: ws://demos.kaazing.com/echo

This tells wildwildws where to connect. With this in your file, wildwildws by default will automatically connect for you when you save the file.

Once connected, simply press the enter key in normal mode to send the paragraph under the cursor to the connection. Easy!

Output from the server is printed in a separate buffer that is opened for you. It's a normal buffer, so you can navigate to it and manipulate its text in all the normal Vim ways.

wildwildws will automatically dispose the output window when you close the .wwws buffer, and will also disconnect for you. If you need to disconnect sooner, a :Disconnect command is provided.

Headers

If you need to send headers along with your initial HTTP request, you can just put them on their own lines, much like the URI: directive. For example:

URI: ws://localhost:3000/api/ws
Authorization: Token {"username":"Bar"}
X-Format: compressed

will send the Authorization and X-Format headers. Also easy!

Commands

:Send will send all the arguments as-is to the server as text.

:Disconnect :Connect both do what you'd expect.

Options

See this file for all the options with explanations. Help files to come... eventually.

Functions

If you want to write your own mappings, wwws#conn#Open() and wwws#conn#Close() open and close the connection for the current .wwws buffer, respectively. wwws#conn#Send() accepts a single string and sends it directly.