Xmonad open terminal in same directory

Question

Is it possible to have Xmonad open a new terminal in the same directory as the active terminal (if the active window is a terminal or a program like vim running in one)? As it is, all my terminals open in $HOME. It does not matter to me if this happens if I open a new terminal in a different workspace. This would be a huge productivity gain because otherwise I would have to cd all the way up to the directory I am working in.

If this is not possible to do directly using Xmonad, I am interested in alternative solutions to this. The only thing I can think of is to overload PROMPT_COMMAND to write out the current directory to a file and have my .bashrc look at this file to determine where to go. But this is a very imperfect solution that would work for many cases, but will leave a good majority incorrect.

Answer 1

I haven't messed with the defaults much and ctrl+shift+n does it for me.

Answer 2

That doesn't really answers your question, but I have an alternative that can save your time and solve your problem: autojump

This is a software that saves your habits when navigating between folders in the terminal. Every time you cd in a folder, it increase the associated likelihood. For example on my system it has now something like:

343368.3820292514   /home/fb
66.1004508305352    /home/fb/documents
65.2439790325514    /home/fb/workspace/MyProject
55.78935025659235   /very/long/path/boring/to/join/Folder
51.78935025659235   /home/fb/master-thesis
49.150383518340945  /usr/share/opencv
43.1282216187962    /home/fb/.dotvim
...

Then afterward, when you want to go in a folder, you can give only a part of the name and it will go to the most probable folder that corresponds. Usually the command j is associated with autojump. For instance in your case the usage will be as follow.

1. Open a terminal
2. (First time only) Go with cd to the folder /very/long/path/boring/to/join/Folder
3. Do some work
4. Later, when you need another terminal, open a new one
5. Entering j fol<ENTER> will bring your directly to /home/fb/very/long/path/boring/to/join/Folder

Of course this only work if the folder you want to join is a folder where you often go.

Answer 3

I set the my directory on a per workspace basis. Then all the terminals I open in that workspace open in that directory. This is done using the workspacedir extension: http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Layout-WorkspaceDir.html

Basically I bound a key to changeDir. When I press that key a prompt pops up that allows you to set the directory (with working tab completion).

Answer 4

If you can get PID of shell running in current window you can than do something like executing urxvt -cd $(readlink /proc/$PID/cwd) (or something similar for different terminal). Don't know how to get pid of current window in XMonad though.

Answer 5

You could use the X window id from withWindowSet and query xprop for PID, from which to extract CWD.

I've been using this approach for some time now (with success), on a Linux machine. It should work on most Unix-like OSes granted you tweak your logic for extracting CWD from PID.