Mapping for Remote Yank of Quoted Text

[paroxyzm]

Hello!

I'm excited about the plugin and have a feature request that might be useful for users who work with various text objects. The idea is to create a mapping that does the following:

• Search Operation: It would search for all occurrences of quotes—whether single quotes, double quotes, or back-ticks—in both the current and remote buffers.
• Target Narrowing & Yank: Once the targets are identified, the mapping would narrow down the selection based on the content inside the quotes (ignoring empty quotes) and automatically yank the inner text. (So, contrary to current status-quo, where the user has to provide text-object)

For example, a mapping might be defined like:

vim.keymap.set("n", "<C-y>", "???" { noremap = true, silent = true })

The expectation is that with a single keybind, the user could perform a remote yank of text within quotes. Similar mappings could later be defined for other text objects, such as brackets or function arguments, etc...

Question:
Is it possible to implement such a functionality within the current plugin framework? I’d appreciate any insights or suggestions.

[rasulomaroff]

Hi there! Sorry it took me a while to respond, quite busy recent days!

As for your suggestions:

telepath.nvim uses leap.nvim plugin under the hood for navigation. It just triggers it to jump to some place, then restores the previous command (delete/yank/whatever) and allows to select a text object to operate on.

Technically, your first suggestion could be implemented by users if I expose/allow to use custom "jump" operation. Then, a user could define a custom search using leap or any other similar plugin. I even tried making it work with other plugins, like flash.nvim and it did work. However, I didn't want to maintain several abstractions at the same time considering the fact that leap was working just fine. Another problem is that these types of plugins often include some workarounds (like this) to get everything right (you can see others if you take a look at the code) and I'm afraid that exposing such a jump functionality could just break the things and make it worse.

As for the second suggestion, I'm afraid it goes beyond the plugin scope. As I said, telepath uses some "jump" function to jump somewhere, restores previous command and awaits a user's action to get them back where they were. Your suggestion assumes yanking only text inside quotes, which can be done using other plugins. For example, I'm using mini.ai and its q text object that means any quotes. So yiq is yank inside quotes. This could be combined with your first suggestion to achieve what you want, if I'm not mistaken.

Overall, the first feature is possible. Especially if I could expose a simple interface that allows to pass a callback that will be called once a user jumped to a place. And I'm not against it even if this feature is implemented as a part of the plugin.

I don't really have time right now to implement it myself though. If you have some time and desire, you could try to play with leap's search function to only search for quotes. I'm suggesting using leap because I already used it for this plugin and it works great. Then, once it works, you could try manipulating jump function that's defined inside remote.lua file. After that, it will be clear which interface is needed to be exposed in order for that to work (I think I even have some local stashes for that).