jumping to line number in editor

[khimaros]

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it would be awesome to jump to the line number of where text was found

for example, zk edit -i, search for a string, press enter, vim opens at that line.

vim itself supports a +<lnum> eg. +23 to jump to line 23.

one way to support this generically would be to have var expansion {{line-number}}

then we could use this in the editor field editor = "vim +{{line-number}}"

[mickael-menu]

The {{line-number}} expansion is a great idea for implementing this, and maybe it could be done for stuff like zk list --match .... But for zk edit -i, I'm not sure how that would work. Is there a way for fzf to return the line number of the match?

[khimaros]

here is the recommended way to do this with fzf: junegunn/fzf#1014 (comment)

the nl tool also has a -s switch which can be used to set the delimiter between the line number and the line content.

[mickael-menu]

This returns the index of the selection list, which is the list of notes and not their content.

[khimaros]

@mickael-menu, i think it would be necessary to make a second invocation to fzf (eg. choosing best match) after the file has been selected in interactive mode.

for posterity, here's my understanding of how zk works today:

• the contents of each file in the database is compressed down to a single line (line breaks removed) with the full path to the file appended to the end
• a list of those file content + file path lines are passed to fzf, one file per line
• fzf returns the file content + file path pair, and zk parses that to extract the full file path and then opens that file with the configured editor

[mickael-menu]

Yes that's how it is implemented in zk currently. Except for third step, we can ask fzf to return a particular field in the line (there are invisible characters separating the "columns"), so we get only the file path and not the content.

I believe you could work out a zk alias to start a second instance of fzf to choose the line to open.

[khimaros]

@mickael-menu i'd love to do this but haven't been able to figure out the right incantation. is there a chance you could guide me in the right direction?

[khimaros]

here's what i have working on the shell:

FILE=some.md
grep -nEv '^[[:space:]]*$' "$FILE" \
    | fzf \
        --tiebreak=begin \
        --exact \
        --tabstop=4 \
        --height=100% \
        --layout=reverse \
        --no-hscroll \
        --color=hl:-1,hl+:-1 \
        --preview-window=wrap \
        --delimiter=':' \
        --with-nth=2.. \
    | sed 's/:.*$//' \
    | xargs -o -I {} vim +{} "$FILE"

all fzf flags except --delimiter= and --with-nth= are from zk defaultOptions

what i'm not clear on is how to integrate this cleanly with the zk editor and other commands.

[khimaros]

okay, the solution i've settled on is to have a bash script in my path named vf which contains:

#!/bin/bash

set -eou pipefail

grep -nEv '^[[:space:]]*$' "$1" \
	| fzf \
		--tiebreak=begin \
		--exact --tabstop=4 \
		--height=100% \
		--layout=reverse \
		--no-hscroll \
		--color=hl:-1,hl+:-1 \
		--preview-window=wrap \
		--delimiter=':' \
		--with-nth=2.. \
	| sed 's/:.*$//' \
	| xargs -o -I {} vim +{} "$1"

and then set in .zk/config.toml

[tools]
editor = 'vf'

[khimaros]

i think the missing piece here is passing the query from the first fzf invocation to the second one.

is there some template or environment variable that could be used for that?

[khimaros]

early draft main...khimaros:zk:main which populates a $ZK_QUERY env var when invoking the editor.

this means the vf command above can pass --query $ZK_QUERY to fzf

it's possible this patch breaks some other behavior of zk.

@mickael-menu curious about your thoughts on this approach.

[khimaros]

now tracking at #361