Unable to add quotes for expression column generation.

[Tanmayshetty]

I was trying to follow this approach to generate a concatenated column https://www.visidata.org/docs/columns/#derived

But I am not able to enter quotes in the terminal on Windows.
If I copy and paste the expression

Year + '-' + Month + '-' + Day

I get the below

I have checked this with wezterm and Windows terminal.

Am I missing something here?

[saulpw]

Hi @Tanmayshetty, what version of VisiData are you using?

[Tanmayshetty]

@saulpw I am using v3.0.2

saul.pw/VisiData v3.0.2

[saulpw]

Can you try with the most recent version on develop?

[Tanmayshetty]

With the dev version I get the same issue

visidata --version
saul.pw/VisiData v3.1dev

python --version
Python 3.12.4

Attached a video

Visidata_key_quote-av1.mp4

[midichef]

I can reproduce the lack of ' on Windows.
setup: Windows Server 2022 Datacenter, version 21H2, running visidata (2.9, 2.11.1, 3.0, 3.0.2, 3.1dev) in Powershell. Keyboard setting in Windows Settings->Language->Keyboard is English (United States).

Other keys are affected too. I get no response from the keys ' and ], nor from pressing them with Shift held: " and }. @Tanmayshetty do these other three keys (], ", and }), have any effects for you in Visidata?

On my system:
For ' the statusbar displays SHF_PADENTER.
For " the statusbar displays CTL_PADENTER.
For ] and } the statusbar displays Ctrl+Space in 3.x; in v2.11.1 it shows Ctrl+@.

Other keys work as expected. All keys visible on a standard US English keyboard, work as expected. They also work when combined with Shift. Alphabet keys, with Ctrl, also work. So do arrow keys, Home/End, Delete. Function keys also work, F1 thru F12, and all twelve combined with Shift. With Ctrl, F2 through F12 give responses, though Ctrl+F1 does not seem to do anything.

On this same Windows Server system, visidata works fine if I run it in Ubuntu inside WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

Edited to add: these four keys ' etc, work fine inside Powershell, just not inside Visidata. If I try to bypass the keyboard by pasting from the system clipboard, when I paste ', I get the same result as if I press it on the keyboard: SHF_PADENTER.

[Tanmayshetty]

Do these other three keys (], ", and }), have any effects for you in Visidata?

These keys do not work as well.

[midichef]

Okay, I now see that this bug has been discussed before in #2119 and #2062.

The last update to those threads was that windows_curses only works with a past version, 2.3.0. It was hoped then that 2.3.2 would fix it.

I can report that 2.3.2 does not fix it, nor does v2.3.3. I tested them on Python 3.12.4, where the versions of windows_curses available to me in pip are 2.3.2a1, 2.3.2, 2.3.3a1, and 2.3.3. None of these work satisfactorily. The first two (.2a1 and .2) cause visidata to exit on startup without showing any data screen; visidata a.tsv exits after saying opening a.tsv as tsv. That last two have the problem of incorrectly reading ' and " and ] and }.

I can report that downgrading windows_curses still works: pip install windows_curses==2.3.0. To use pip for this, I had to use Python 3.10, specifically 3.10.11, which is the last version of 3.10 that has a binary installer for Windows. However, that version is not an acceptable solution as it's missing several security fixes from 3.10.14. If you can figure out how to get Python 3.12.4 to use windows_curses 2.3.0, that may work.

But the solution I recommend is to run visidata inside Windows Subsystem for Linux.

[Tanmayshetty]

I now see that this bug has been discussed before in #2119 and #2062.

Thanks for the issue reference.
I will use the workaround specified here.