Neovide: Sublime/VSC Style Minimap

[shaunsingh]

Hi, I was wondering if it was possible to have a Sublime style minimap in the gui?

For example, the akiyosi fork of goneovim has this on the right hand side :

There is a plugin for neovim that accomplishes something similar (minimap.vim), but its limited to the text rendering of neovim so it uses braille font (which doesn't look as good).

This may not be possible right now (I assume it would require multigrid support as you need to draw the window over neovim), but is this something you can look into for the future?

Sincerely
Shaurya

[PyGamer0]

dup of this issue, but its closed. But even I agree neovide should have a custom minimap like goneovim with syntax highlighting.

[shaunsingh]

the issue with making it a plugin is that you can't take advantage of gui features, and so you would be either

1. limiting to display uncolored monospaced text
2. making an implementation that can "display" an image using cat and put it in a floating window
   The first one doesn't look very good, and the second one doesn't have an implementation yet, but even if it did I imagine it would be slow

[j4qfrost]

Wouldn't be too complicated for the view, interacting might be a bit
tricky. I think we should approach the problem with a plugin solution so
that we can get some code reuse. I'll free up some time next week to look
into this.

On Fri, May 21, 2021, 7:52 AM PyGamer0 @.*> wrote:

dup of this issue https://github.com/Kethku/neovide/issues/429, but its
closed. But even I agree neovide should have a custom minimap like goneovim
with syntax highlighting.

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[j4qfrost]

@shaunsignh just saw your comment. When I say plugin I mean that neovide
would have its own plugin system. We would be able to leverage internals
and have more control over functionality.

On Fri, May 21, 2021, 7:55 AM anhquan nguyen @.*> wrote:

Wouldn't be too complicated for the view, interacting might be a bit
tricky. I think we should approach the problem with a plugin solution so
that we can get some code reuse. I'll free up some time next week to look
into this.

On Fri, May 21, 2021, 7:52 AM PyGamer0 @.*> wrote:

dup of this issue https://github.com/Kethku/neovide/issues/429, but
its closed. But even I agree neovide should have a custom minimap like
goneovim with syntax highlighting.

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[shaunsingh]

Ah, sorry I misinterpreted it that.

A plugins system sounds like a very good idea. Then you could add new features without decreasing performance. A plugin system could also open up the door to other features e.g. custom tablines or markdown previews

[shaunsingh]

I was looking at goneovim's implementation here: https://github.com/akiyosi/goneovim/blob/master/editor/minimap.go, and it looks like they just spawn a second incredibly small/long neovim process. Is this the best way to implement it?

[Kethku]

I'm definitely interested in peoples thoughts here, but I have a vision for eventually exposing a graphics api to neovim itself. Imagine a series of functions which are loaded on startup that let a third party neovim plugin add graphics to a given buffer. This way anybody could add arbitrary graphical features to the neovim windows from whatever plugin language they like.

I mentioned the idea in the previous minimap issue and I think it has merit and imho would make neovide way more compelling to use as a gui

[Kethku]

Imagine live coding a procedural vector graphics animation into the window you're coding on. Thats the sort of thing I'd like to enable

[Kethku]

Ah, sorry I misinterpreted it that.

A plugins system sounds like a very good idea. Then you could add new features without decreasing performance. A plugin system could also open up the door to other features e.g. custom tablines or markdown previews

Just to respond here. Neovim plugins can also be remote processes which call functions asynchronously. Exposing graphics functions to neovim plugins doesn't necessarily slow things down

[shaunsingh]

That sounds awesome! One of the biggest things I miss about emacs is the inline LaTeX previews and being able to insert images, you can obviously open up a live preview in a browser for neovim, but having everything in one place makes it much easier

[Kethku]

Its a pretty big design problem because we will have to expose a remote api which is easy enough to understand while still handling all the use cases, but using a minimap plugin as a target use case seems like a great way to go. It could help motivate what needs exposed.

This sort of graphics api is high on my list for what to work on after the current set of pinned issues, but if somebody wants to take a stab at it sooner, I'd love to work with them. Warning though, I'm going to be pretty particular and will likely want a fair bit of iteration on what it looks like because I see it as a huge potential draw for neovide in general

[Kethku]

Which is not to say don't go for it :P just that I'm gonna want to work closely with anybody who does :)