Ability to update prefills with visual selection

[mehalter]

I love the improvements to the API and particularly enjoy the ability to update the prefills of a given instance. Given that the prefilling with visual selection is a separate command, could there be an addition to the API to allow updating the prefills with the current visual selection as well?

[MagicDuck]

hi @mehalter,

So the way visual selection currently works is a bit special in that depending on the engine (ripgrep/astgrep) we put in additional flags. For example, for ripgrep, we add --multiline --fixed-strings. This works on initial launch but would feel weird on an update_instance_prefills() call.

I think what we can do though and would be the most flexible is expose a utility function to get the current visual selection as a string, that users can then pass to update_instance_prefills(). Seems like a common enough thing and would be annoying to rewrite.

Implementation would look something like:

function M.get_current_visual_selection()
  local isVisualMode = vim.fn.mode():lower():find('v') ~= nil
  if isVisualMode then
    -- needed to make visual selection work
    vim.cmd([[normal! vv]])
  end

  local selection_lines = utils.getVisualSelectionLines()
  return vim.fn.join(selection_lines, '\n')
end

So you would call it like:

grugFar.update_instance_prefills('myinstance', { search = grugFar.get_current_visual_selection() })

The beauty of this is that you can modify it before passing it in or prefill some other input like replace.

[mehalter]

Oh yeah that looks great!

[MagicDuck]

done 😄

[MagicDuck]

let me know if you see any issue, it was sort of hastily thrown in 😄

[mehalter]

I'll let you know tomorrow when I mess around with it. Only thing that comes immediatly to mind is it seems like there might be a good way to interpolate this through the open and with_visual_selection functions to save on duplicate code

[MagicDuck]

Those ones already use the util function, and are slightly different since they need to call on engine specific logic, but if there is a nice way to do it I am not against it…

[mehalter]

@MagicDuck I took a stab at this while also fixing a few bugs in the visual selection code. Mainly bugs in how the code was leaving visual mode which was exposed when using the update_prefills method. And another bug that was breaking visual line mode. I opened up a PR that should be good for review now. This refactor did lead to a nice way to centralize the semantics of "getting a visual selection" so that it is retrieved the same way across the code base. Hope this helps! I'm glad to get to contribute to a great project :D

PR #265

[MagicDuck]

Thank you for those, I wish I could get more people like you, who create PRs instead of just asking, haha!

[mehalter]

No problem! Team work makes the dream work in the open-source community 🤗