Closing Indention Hint Tool Tip

[eric-hemasystems]

Wanted to share a small module that I have found to be pretty helpful to me. On some languages the closing of scope can become deeply nested and it's not always clear what what closing content goes with what opening content.

The indention_guides helped as sometimes you could follow the line up to see the opening of the indention. But for large blocks of scope the "start" of the indention was often off the screen. Furthermore with deep nesting sometimes it was hard to follow the vertical line among a bunch of vertical lines. Example:

With my module the opening indent is displayed in a tool tip (via abusing the call tip) when your cursor is on the line closing that indentation. Example:

The opening of that indentation is so far above it's not even visible but I can still easily see what started the indentation. I found this so useful that I don't really need the indention guides anymore so removed them just become my minimalism can't handle the clutter. :)

Below is the module if it's useful to anyone else.

function string.trim(str)
  return str:gsub('^%s+', ''):gsub('%s+$', '')
end

view.indentation_guides = view.IV_NONE

events.connect(events.UPDATE_UI, function(updated)
  -- We only care when the cursor moves
  if not (updated & buffer.UPDATE_SELECTION) then return end

  -- Hide any previous call-tip displaying matching indentation
  view.call_tip_cancel()

  local line = buffer:line_from_position(buffer.current_pos)
  local line_text = buffer.get_line(line)
  local blank = line_text == "\n"

  -- Starting line is blank so nothing to match up against
  if blank then return end

  -- First line can't match up to anything so return early otherwise we get an
  -- error trying to read the previous line.
  if line == 1 then return end

  local cur_indent = buffer.line_indentation[line]
  local prev_indent = buffer.line_indentation[line-1]

  -- If the previous line is not nested, return early as we are not ending a
  -- indention match
  if prev_indent <= cur_indent then return end

  repeat
    line = line - 1
    prev_indent = buffer.line_indentation[line]
    line_text = buffer:get_line(line)
    blank = line_text == "\n"
  until prev_indent <= cur_indent and not blank

  line_text = line_text:trim()
  view:call_tip_show(buffer.current_pos, line_text)
end)

I initially showed the line in the status bar (which is what a previous editor I used did) but I found on a large screen that required more effort to go from the line, to the status bar and back to the line to do my work. It was nicer just as a tooltip right below the line I'm working on.