Difficult to edit certain parts of the filesystem

[mwleeds]

Since the /usr in the flatpak sandbox is different from the host /usr, it's difficult to edit files there with flatpak'd vim: org.vim.Vim /usr/etc/dracut.conf.d/endless.conf results in vim opening a new empty file in a new directory rather than editing the file at that location on the host. Since nano is not installed via flatpak, nano /usr/etc/dracut.conf.d/endless.conf works fine.

A workaround is to use org.vim.Vim /run/host/usr/etc/dracut.conf.d/endless.conf but it would be nice to have a seamless solution to this.

[wjt]

Yeah. If you have ideas for what a seamless solution would be, I'm all ears. I do have some alternative seams you might like to try!

I have EDITOR=org.vim.Vim, which means sudoedit /usr/etc/dracut.conf.d/endless.conf does the right thing, because sudoedit copies the file to a temporary file in /var/tmp, which is visible in the sandbox for this reason. https://github.com/flathub/org.vim.Vim/blob/master/org.vim.Vim.json#L18

flatpak run has a --file-forwarding argument. Try flatpak run --file-forwarding org.vim.Vim @@ /usr/etc/dracut.conf.d/endless.conf. The .desktop files are rewritten to use this syntax so if you browse to /usr/etc/dracut.conf.d/ in Nautilus and open the file in (G)Vim then it can open the file. If the path in question is visible at that path inside the sandbox, it's passed through verbatim; otherwise it's mapped through the document portal. I think this could be made smarter in Flatpak itself: files in /usr could be mapped to /run/host/usr if the latter is visible.

I previously opened flatpak/flatpak#1947 about something similar and the conclusion was that it's not really possible to make the bare org.vim.Vim wrapper script smarter (without requiring that the user type @@ themself) because Flatpak can't otherwise distinguish between filename arguments and options. I've grown used to typing it out longhand but also at one point had a wrapper script, vim-ff, which was effectively an alias for flatpak run --file-forwarding org.vim.Vim @@ "$@".