filter-jump

Motivation

I wanted a smooth way to move the cursor subject to certain criterion in the follow scenarios:

1. Large Screen Wide Movement/Better / Functionality:

• No typing numbers: As explained in this video, numbers are far away and do not keep your typing "cache-friendly".(Also I'm just bad at touch typing numbers)
• Jump actually adds to jumps list: For example, relative movements(i.e 10j) will not be added to the jumplist. Although absolute movements do add to the jumplist, this may force you to type 3+ numbers, which as explained above, is slowww.
• So based off the requirements above, it would seem / would do the job. The issues with it, however, are as follows:
  • Forces me to type the exact match, when often times I want to ignore capital letters and underscores. Although I can set the search to be case insensitive, that then conflicts when I want to use / to actually search instead of jump
  • Will search the entire file instead of just the letters in the current window. This is problematic b/c if the next match is only available off screen, vim will scroll my buffer down rather than remaining in the same view
  • Jump searches will pollute my search history.

2. Inline Movement/Better f Functionality:

• Vim's normal mode f suffers from two main problems. First, often times one character is just too imprecise, which will means we have to traverse with ; 2-4 times before reaching our destination.
• Second, because the matching results are not highlighted, it is hard to know exactly how many times we have to press ;. To continue with our computer science analogy, we are basically traversing at the speed of a linked list, where we are unable to "prefetch" the next memory segment(aka whether or not to change the character we are searching for or just keep spamming ;) until we have arrived at the current node(aka match).

Furthermore, the following plugins could not produce the behavior I wanted, for various reasons.

And finally, I wanted an excuse to write my first Vim plugin :). So perhaps the behavior I wanted could have been achieved through advanced configuration/hacking of the above plugins.

Installation

Use your favorite plugin manager, such as vim-plug:

Plug 'bbli/filter-jump.nvim', {'do': ':UpdateRemotePlugins'}

Mappings/Usage

Examples

• All words/characters after the initial one will be used to "filter" the matches. My idea was basically to keep typing words/phrases around the place I want to jump to rather than do something that involved more "decision making", such as planning a sequence of vim motions or thinking about the least commonly occurring characters.

• Search is case insensitive and will ignore certain characters of your choosing(See More Customization below)

• Will not add to search history, but will add to jumplist

• Or you can just start moving to the next matches. If result is near bottom, I just use <C-p> instead

• Or do both! The algorithm will keep track of where your latest selection is at and will choose the closest among the new set of highlights

• Finally, you can call :FilterJumpLineForward and :FilterJumpLineBackward for variable length f/F search.

• Note that filtering is not available in this mode. Also search is now case sensitive and there are no ignore characters

HOW TO

1. Opening FilterJump

• There is no default mappings. Add these maps to your vimrc.
• They also exists as a command mode commands(i.e :FilterJump)

nmap s <Plug>(FilterJump)
nmap f <Plug>(FilterJumpLineForward)
nmap F <Plug>(FilterJumpLineBackward)

2. FilterJump Insert Mode Action Keys

• These are the default hotkeys. Add this to your vimrc and change it if you want
• You can also call the built in Vim command :bwipeout,:bdelete, or just leave:q the jump buffer while in normal mode, and the buffer and highlights will also be cleared.

let g:filter_jump_keymaps = {
    \ "<C-n>" : "FilterJumpNextMatch",
    \ "<C-p>" "FilterJumpPrevMatch",
    \ "<CR>" : "FilterJumpSelect",
    \ "<C-f>" : "FilterJumpSelect",
    \ "<C-c>" : "FilterJumpExit" "Note this one overrides the default Vim command, which goes back to normal mode
    \}

More Customization

Characters to Ignore

By default, this plugin will just ignore _ when searching during :FilterJump. To override this:

let g:filter_jump_strip_characters = ["_","#",":"]

Setting specific options in the JumpBuffer

• Since the search word is typed in a temporary buffer, there may be some keymaps that you would like to not be triggered in this buffer.(As shown below, you actually can put any command mode command into the list, and they will be called when the JumpBuffer is opened)

let g:filter_jump_buffer_options = ["inoremap <buffer> <C-j> <Nop>" ,"let b:coc_pairs_disabled = ['`','(','[','{','<',]"]

Changing the Highlight Coloring

This plugin defines the highlight groups SearchCurrent and SearchHighlights, and maps them to built in Search and IncSearch highlight groups respectively. If you would like to change that, add something like the following:

highlight! link SearchCurrent Red "This assumes you have the Red highlight group defined.
highlight! link SearchHighlights Green

Acknowledgements

Aerojump for the settings I need to set when opening the jump buffer and keymapping code

TODO

• why isn't highlighting working when there are errors?
• apply closest first to FilterLineForward/Backwards too -> to see how easy it was to change