Navigate to the found string, in context

[CaptainQuirk]

Hi,

First, thanks for this plugin, I use it litterally every day and it made working with tmux a real pleasure.

One thing I miss, though, is the ability to have a bit of context around the matched string. I was wondering if it would be possible to bind a key to a new action that would make it possible to see the occurences of a string in context.

The behavior would be the following one, expressed in Gherkin :

Feature: Navigate to a found string

Scenario: User search for a string in a one pane window
  Given I'm in a tmux pane and I just executed a phpunit command
  And the terminal has been filled with test failures originating from two different files named MyFile.php file in different folders
  When I launch extracto
  And I type the characters MyFile
  And I switch to match a path with Ctrl-F
  And I see both matched file paths
  And I press the configured shortcut to navigate to the occurences of the first match
  Then the pane in question should scroll to the most recent occurence in the pane
  And the occurence should be highlighted
  When I press <Enter>
  Then the file should be open in the editor

Evidently, when the window contains several panes, there should be a way to cycle through it all, but before entering into those details, I'd like to know if that's something you'd consider adding to extrakto ?

Thanks in advance

[laktak]

The idea is good but there are a few issues

• ektrakto shows a popup, so anything highlighted behind the popup is not very useful
• to work around that we would need a toggle to hide/show the popup - however when the user presses the toggle we (maybe by accident) he wouldn't be able to discover how to exit this mode
• because the term can occur multiple times you would need a next/previous shortcut as well
• when taking input from multiple panes the shortcut would have to jump between panes as well

I don't think this behaviour would be very user friendly. If you really need the context you can just copy and then search in tmux IMO.

[Kristijan]

I only installed this plugin a couple of days ago, and context is one thing that would be nice. How about an alternate approach for those using fzf. Allow for using the fzf preview feature, and populate the content with capture-pane?

e.g. fzf <other options> --preview 'tmux capture-pane -ep -t <pane_id>' --preview-window='right,,,nowrap'

Given a vertical split, you could then narrow the search down on the left, and have the context on the right. I guess you'd need to set @extrakto_grab_area to "full", so the scope is limited to a single tmux pane.

[laktak]

This solves a lot of the problems and is also easier to implement.

The remaining issue is that it still only shows the first match ... do you think it would be useful with that limitation?

[Kristijan]

I'll selfishly say that it's useful to me, but unsure how that works for @CaptainQuirk 😝

Going with no preview as the default to not interrupt anyone else makes most sense...but I don't know how you'd go about gathering further feedback if others find it useful.

[laktak]

No worries. I might have a look at your version when I get some time.

[CaptainQuirk]

Hi,

Being a long term fzf user myself, I had overlooked that extrakto could work without it.

I'm not in a position to test your solution @Kristijan but as far as I understand it, the context would be in the fzf preview in the form of the whole tmux pane, but there wouldn't be any means to go from one match to another easily.

At least for people using fzf, I think that the solution could be to enter search mode in the first pane when extrakto is launched and execute fzf with bound keys that allow backward and forward search.
For multiple panes, indeed, some additionnal code would be required in extrakto I guess, so that cycling between matches in multiple panes would feel natural.
I'm not even sure that native tmux search could be used for this.