Actions that require a tty when tv's stdout isn't connected to one

[CheariX]

Description
A description of what the bug is.

Example

Use "tv files" with actions.edit on an arbitrary file.

Pressing F12 on a file works if I'm on bash.

In fish shell, the shell simply hangs.

Expected behavior
Editing the file should work in all shells, not only bash.

Environment

• OS: Mac
• TV version: 0.13.2
• shell: [bash, fish(4.0.2)]
• terminal: Alacritty

Additional context

If I change the action to vim instead of nvim, like this:

[actions.edit]
description = "Opens the selected entries with the default editor (falls back to vim)"
command = "vim {}"
mode = "execute"

Then I can see the following error:

Vim: Warning: Output is not to a terminal

[lalvarezt]

Can you try fork instead of execute? I use fish and don't have an issue

[CheariX]

Thank you for this information! It is good to know that it works. So maybe it must be something on my side?
Changing to "fork" does not change anything - the same buggy behavior.

I also started with fish --no-config to make sure that nothing else broke it. Still not working.

[alexpasmantier]

Thanks for the feedback.

I'm not able to reproduce either using fish and the default files channel on 0.13.2.

Screencast.From.2025-08-11.22-02-33.mp4

I'm guessing from the error message your stdout isn't connected to a TTY for some reason. Both fork and execute in tv currently inherit the parent's stdio so as long as you're running tv in an environment when stdout is connected to a TTY this should work as intended.

A simple way of confirming this is to launch tv and redirect stdout so that it's not connected to a TTY anymore:

tv 1>/dev/null

which reproduces the same error

Vim: Warning: Output is not to a terminal

The same will happen if you try to pipe tv's output to something else

tv | less

which is probably an issue we want to address.

[loralb]

This also happens to me when invoking tv through the smart autocompletion integration (for example vim <Ctrl-t>). Indeed, the fish function tv_smart_autocomplete generated by tv init fish invokes television with this line:

if set -l result (tv $dir --autocomplete-prompt "$current_prompt" --input $tv_query --inline)

which does not have a terminal as output, IIUC.

[lalvarezt]

hi, like I mentioned before I use fish and all the features work just fine. Would you mind sharing your config file and the channel you have issues with (any will do). Also how exactly are you calling television, if you can make a screencast that would help a lot, thanks

[joelazar]

I experience the same as well, my config is here.

[gauravkumar37]

Same issue, using fish with tv init fish | source in config.fish. When running tv I am able to open vim but when invoking ctrl-t smart completion, I get the same error Vim: Warning: Output is not to a terminal

[gauravkumar37]

Figured out the fix, we just have to force a tty, then it works correctly.
So, in tv_smart_autocomplete function where we have set -l result (tv $dir --autocomplete-prompt "$current_prompt" --input $tv_query --inline), it should be set -l result (tv $dir --autocomplete-prompt "$current_prompt" --input $tv_query --inline >/dev/tty)

Edit: this breaks the tv's selection because that is output to stdout. The way this is currently handled is both vim and selection goes to stdout.

Edit2: figured out a good workaround in channels without changing any code in tv
This works both in fork and execute modes. Notice that both require a /dev/tty output but additionally execute requires echoing the selected entry to stdout so that the same can be captured by tv's $res
Tested with both bat and vim in fish shell on linux

[actions.preview]
description = "Previews the selected entries with bat"
command = "bat -n '{}' >/dev/tty"
mode = "fork"

[actions.preview2]
description = "Previews the selected entries with bat"
command = "bat -n '{}' >/dev/tty;echo '{}'"
mode = "execute"

Edit 3: Thinking more on this, the echo isn't needed in execute action. I mean it's subjective but we are executing an action not selecting the entry so why should the entry be replaced in the commandline. So then, both fork and execute are the same and the correct fix then is to modify tv's code to attach a tty when executing the action's command (@alexpasmantier)