Add prompt for arguments when launching debugger

[gregersn]

With the java extension for VS Code, when editing launch parameters, you can set args to be "${command:SpecifyProgramArgs}" which will prompt for arguments.

A similar feature for Python would have been most appreciated.

[karthiknadig]

Thank you for the suggestion! We have marked this issue as "needs decision" to make sure we have a conversation about your idea. We plan to leave this feature request open for at least a month to see how many 👍 votes the opening comment gets to help us make our decision.

[novirium]

This would be very useful if implemented. While we can already use a promptString input in launch.json to allow user input to args when debugging, this is limited to a single argument (as the args value is a list of strings, not one long string, and variable substitution only works within strings).

There has been discussion about this in various places (cpp-tools, js-debug, and vscode itself), and the straightforward solution has been to introduce a new parameter for the debugger in launch.json: argsString. This has been successfully implemented by bash-debug in this PR. The upshot is the content of argsString is parsed by shell-quote, and the resulting array of strings is appended to the normal args parameter.

This would allow users to use a VSCode promptstring input to allow arbitrary command arguments during debug (which would be really useful!) with something like:

launch.json:

{
    "version": "0.2.0",
    "configurations": [
        {
            "name": "Python: Test CLI (input)",
            "type": "python",
            "request": "launch",
            "module": "mycli",
            "argsString": "${input:argPrompt}"
        },
    ],
    "inputs": [
        {
            "id": "argPrompt",
            "description": "CLI arguments",
            "default": "",
            "type": "promptString"
        }
    ]
}

[luabud]

@novirium this is great, thanks for bringing it up!

[gregersn]

Is there any progress on this? Manually adding parameters to launch settings every time I need to debug a new script gets tedious.

[luabud]

@gregersn Apologies, no progress on this yet. It's something that is on our radar but not ETAs as of now.

[xavierdubhc]

Hello, I'd really appreciate something like this, is there any plan on adding this :) ?

[ceusebi-eb]

Not from the team but I stumbled across this and with this snippet:

{
    "version": "0.2.0",
    "inputs": [
        {
            "id": "fileArguments",
            "description": "The arguments to send to the debugger",
            "type": "promptString",
            "default": "",
        }
    ],
    "configurations": [
        {
            "name": "Python: Current File",
            "type": "python",
            "console": "integratedTerminal",
            "request": "launch",
            "program": "${file}",
            "args": "${input:fileArguments}",
            "justMyCode": true
        }
    ]
}

It is possible to obtain multiple parameters split as you type them

VsCode Version: 1.73.1
Python extension Version: v2022.18.2