Support for named buffers and command placeholders

[pdolezal]

Originally, I just wanted to propose a feature for comparing a pair of files, each of them in a different directory. In a two-panel file manager, I would navigate each of the panels to the respective directories and select the files to compare. Or I could invoke any other command that would take left & right path and perform the desired action, hence it would not be limited just to comparing files or directories.

A two-panel file manager might have variables for the items in the left and right panels and the possibility to configure a custom command template using these variables in placeholders. Well, Yazi has no panels 🤔 And then the idea popped out 💡 I was just playing with bookmarks plugin which has "named buffers" for holding the locations. What if we extended the concept further?

Let's assume Yazi maintains a set of named buffers that could be used by plugins and/or in some kind of command templates with placeholders referring to the buffers. What it could help with?

For instance, boomarks could be implemented trivially as the action that jumps to a buffer's target. If we could mark a buffer as persistent, we would get optionally persistent bookmarks 😃

Some buffers might be implicit and filled automatically. For instance, the bookmarks plugin can maintain a dedicated ' buffer and fill it with the path to the hovered item before jumping to a bookmark, which makes jumping back and forth pretty easy. However, there are other cases where automatically filled buffers could be useful: if we had a queue of buffers 1-9 for the last selected items, the compare feature could be trivially implemented as invoking my favourite diff-like command taking buffers 1 and 2 (the last two selected files) as arguments. Or I could make a convention for myself to use l and r buffer for left and right compare and have the compare command configured to use these two specific buffers. (That might be related a feature that would provide a list of such command templates… and the possibility to bind keys to them, of course. A general command palette with fuzzy search, mentioned as another idea, could integrate it too 😇)

Anyway, the important thing is that the buffers could effectively connect locations from different tabs, which is something that Yazi lacks, I believe.