Register a keypress every n milliseconds

[enricozb]

In order to get myself used to kakoune's scripting & extension abilities, I wanted to try to port vim-comfortable-motion. However, it relies on vimscript's timer facilities. I'm wondering if kakoune has anything like this. Specifically, I want to have a keypress <c-j> or <c-k> register an asynchronous command, that executes a keypress, namely j or k, at specifically timed intervals.

How would I go about doing this?

[mawww]

Supporting timers has been on the back of my mind for a few years now, but it lacked a strong motivating use case. I think it would make sense to add that.

The problem then is to define exactly how they should work. I think timers would likely want to be scoped (a timer could be added to global, buffer or window scope), although for this use case they would not need to (as they would likely invoke eval -client <name> ... to run in a client's context as the goal here is to scroll the window). We would need a way to add/remove timers as well.

Maybe timers should get integrated into the hook system ? That would avoid adding whole new system.

[lenormf]

hook -once window Timer delay=3000 "echo 3s have passed"

seems natural enough!

[enricozb]

I would love this feature.

I think a timer through a hook for an external script would be enough. For comfortable motion to work, it needs a small amount of state and logic, but that would make more sense on an outside script. Again, I'm really not versed at all on what kakoune scripts can do, but the main logic for vim-comfortable-motion seems like it could not be done with kakoune alone.

[lenormf]

Related #673.

[Delapouite]

Another time/delay related issue #2066