[Feature request] Show alternate sources as tabs at the top of the tree UI

[akinsho]

Firstly, this feature is kind of pure nice to have territory, as a user can easily do what they want without it. I do think though that it will improve discoverability. With that said, onto the actual feature.

I happened upon a screenshot of Intellij's new editor fleet and noticed that it offered separate tabs to view the git tree/source as well as history. It made me think that neo-tree offers multiple sources, but they are only accessible via the command line. You have to reopen neotree with that source specified in order to see it. Maybe there is a more ergonomic way I'm not aware of. Also, you need to remember in the moment that a source exists. I think it would be really nice if there was a visual indicator like a tab maybe using winbar or something to show multiple tabs and a mapping +/- click function to swap between them.

This is sort of a "this could be cool" not sure how much work it will be on your side but essentially just floating the idea to see what you think.

[akinsho]

These things are probably old news to ex GUI editor users, but I've only ever used vim/nvim, so I'm always pretty intrigued by some of the discoverability that GUI editors tend to provide with things like this

[cseickel]

I think a Winbar would be a great way to implement this, but that is a very personal feature so maybe we could just provide a function that a user can call within their winbar if they use it.

Something like:

if vim.bo.filetype == "neo-tree" then
    vim.wo.winbar = "%!v:lua.require'neo-tree'.winbar_source_picker()"
end

I don't know if that is the correct syntax, but you get the idea.

[cseickel]

Also, if someone happens to use bufferline, and that bufferline provides an offset for the file tree plugin, the bufferline plugin could probably provide the feature as well.

[akinsho]

@cseickel I imagined it would be gated behind a config option, so people can enable/disable as they please. Re. providing the function, I think it will be more user-friendly to take a config option as a boolean or a list of sources. Whereas a function puts the onus on a new user to do a lot of wiring up. Ultimately any mechanism that could work would be great, but I've noticed a trend towards huge lumps of lua in configs (which I'm also very guilty of in my plugins) I think a function as an option should be a power tool for people looking to go wild

[akinsho]

Re. bufferline it's true that space could be used by one, but I really don't think it's the remit of a bufferline plugin to manage that sort of thing. I guess if a function was provided via the API a user could just use it inside their config for the bufferline, but I think this falls into the remit of people going wild in their configs as opposed to the default behaviour or anything official IMO

[akinsho]

NOTE: This is all just one guy's opinion. Feel free to implement it however you wish, if you want to at all

[cseickel]

I agree with your points in general about a boolean config being ideal and it certainly should be the concern of this plugin and not bufferline.nvim. The problem is that nvim isn't very flexible about how these spaces can be configured.

There is only one tabline, so if you use it and you want this picker to be in that top row, the feature has to be integrated by that buffer/tab plugin.

Likewise with winbar, it's either on for all windows or off for all windows, so you can't use the feature in Neo-tree in isolation, it has to be part of your custom config or another plugin. The good news with this one is that I suppose it can still be a boolean flag which would then override your winbar for this one window, assuming you already have a default setting for the rest of your windows which is appropriate.

The good news is that I think the syntax is the same for winbar and tabline, so I can provide a generic function that can be used in many ways.

Feel free to implement it however you wish, if you want to at all

The funny thing is that I am not interested in using this feature at all, but I am kind of interested in it as a technical/ui challenge. I may do it for fun, especially if more people express interest.

[akinsho]

Likewise with winbar, it's either on for all windows or off for all windows

I might have misunderstood, but I don't think this statement is correct a winbar can definitely be applied locally to a window, so it isn't something that will interfere with other winbars as an example I'm working a similar idea for toggleterm to show the available terminals as tabs in the winbar. You would just have to ensure it is set via vim.wo[win].winbar which is what I do in my config to make sure it doesn't appear in unwanted places.

Alternatively, in nightly there is also nvim_win_set_value which can be scoped locally to a win or buffer and is now what vim.wo|bo use under the hood. I think exposing whatever solution as a function is a good call then people can put it up there if they want but to my mind aesthetically I wouldn't expect for it to be up there since it isn't even that way in the screenshot above, seems weird to have it as the absolute top line but that's a personal aesthetic thing

[cseickel]

I might have misunderstood, but I don't think this statement is correct a winbar can definitely be applied locally to a window, so it isn't something that will interfere with other winbars

What I meant was that you can have winbar be on just for one window (as far as I know). They can definitely have different values for different windows though. The user would need to be aware of this and configure winbar for other windows themselves. That's why I hesitate in providing it as a config, because I will inevitably get the "Neotree makes all my windows have an extra blank space at the top" issue.

as an example I'm working a similar idea for toggleterm to show the available terminals as tabs in the winbar.

Cool idea!

[akinsho]

@cseickel I believe you can i.e. Without the empty space if scoped locally and nil globally it won't render the space. I'm pretty sure I had such a set up in my config but didn't like the faff so just render it everywhere now

[cseickel]

Without the empty space if scoped locally and nil globally it won't render the space.

Well that would change everything then. I know I had problems when I was setting up my own winbar, I wanted to hide it for certain windows but it didn't work for me. I found this and thought it was by design: neovim/neovim#18660

However, I was just able to make it work as you described by setting the global option to nil and just setting a local option for one window. That means I can safely do it for Neo-tree and not worry about it turning on winbar for all windows.

[pysan3]

Hi, I think this feature is awesome so I kinda looked into the code to see if this is possible.

Sorry if I was just reinventing the wheel but I did a proof of concept implementation and created a PR (#427 ) .

Would love to hear your feedbacks.