😖 Consider drop the "buffer previewer" feature!

[linrongbin16]

Hi users, thanks for your feedbacks & bugs report for a long time!

This is a hard decision and I would like to hear your voice: I'm considering dropping an important feature in fzfx plugin - the "buffer previewer" feature.

Background

The "buffer previewer" feature helps improve the colorscheme in the (right side of) fzf preview window. Even fzf natively supports preview window with the "bat" command, there's a big limitation from "bat" command: It uses the "Sublime Text" theme system and not compatible with nvim colorscheme.

This brings an unfriendly looking when previewing file contents with bat command. And also this is the main reason why fzfx plugin creates the "buffer previewer" feature: it uses the nvim buffer to preview the file contents.

Pros and Cons

The Pros of "buffer previewer" are:

• 100% same colorscheme with the neovim editor, which provides the best looking experience.

The Cons are:

• Tearing apart the architecture and design inside the engine of fzfx plugin, it requires a huge development effort the maintain this.
• A more laggy previewing performance, though it is not obvious on small files. But on big files, it could bother you.

New Changes

For now, fzfx supported both of them, and tolerated this technical tearing apart internally. But with more features and improvements, I feel like it is quite a big burden for me to maintain the "buffer previewer".

A good news is that, I create another solution for "bat" color/theme system: An auto-generated bat theme retrieved from nvim colorscheme. It automatically retrieves colors from nvim highlighting groups, and generate a sublime text .tmTheme file in your local bat config directory, then update into the bat command for you. All process are automatically running in the background.

So when users use fzfx plugin, the bat will choose the auto-generated sublime text theme to keep compatible with nvim colorscheme.

With this new solution, I would like to drop the "buffer previewer" feature, and thus keeps the architecture neat and clean.

Here's few images to show the difference of "buffer previewer" (on the left) and "auto-generated bat theme" (on the right):

I adjusted the width of the preview window to make it larger to easily see it.

• Monokai ColorScheme

  

• GitHub Dark ColorScheme

  

• Gruvbox ColorScheme

  

Your Choice

Would you want to keep the "buffer previewer" feature? Or you can accept the auto-generated bat theme? Please give me feedbacks by choosing "Keep Buffer Previewer" or "Accept Auto-Generated Bat Theme".

[linrongbin16]

Personally I think "Keep buffer previewer" is a more correct decision from the product perspective. But after trying several times, I found I cannot provide both good performance and previewing looking experiences with nvim buffer.

Actually, I would rather recommend using fzf-lua. Since I found it has a quite great previewing performance, even with nvim buffer.

After some struggling, the final decision would be drop the "nvim buffer" previewer, and I will also drop the "auto-generated bat themes" feature, to keep this plugin simple and small.