[vim/vim] Support for conceal string - cstr in addition to cchar (#4687)

Anton Kochkov

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Jul 16, 2019, 11:25:20 AM7/16/19

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To show the string instead of the concealed text fragment, without various additional hacks. So, for example in addition to

 syntax keyword int int conceal cchar=ℤ

you would be able to write something like this:

syntax keyword int int conceal cstr='ℤ64'

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Marco Trosi

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Jul 20, 2019, 12:43:33 AM7/20/19

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I have a list of feature requests and this is one of them. thank you.
In my Vim user group we also discussed recently why conceal is limited to single characters.
cstr seems to make sense. I'm very interested to hear what @brammool thinks about it.

Bram Moolenaar

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Jul 20, 2019, 3:26:10 PM7/20/19

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> I have a list of feature requests and this is one of them. thank you.
> In my Vim user group we also discussed recently why conceal is limited to single characters.
> cstr seems to make sense. I'm very interested to hear what @brammool thinks about it.

There is no other reason than that it's a bit of work to implement.
At the time there didn't seem to be much use for adding more complicated
code, a single character should cover most use cases.

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Marco Trosi

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Jul 20, 2019, 5:36:32 PM7/20/19

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Thanks @brammool for the insight.
I could ask around and collect useful use cases to see if it is worth the effort someday in the future.

ngenisis

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Jul 30, 2019, 5:33:34 PM7/30/19

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Here's a use case I've run up against: when editing Mathematica code, I would like to conceal things like \[FormalQ] to q̣ (as in the Mathematica front-end), but cchar does not seem to support combining characters.

Yohann Bearzi

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Aug 7, 2019, 10:59:03 AM8/7/19

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Here's another use case. When spaces are used instead of tabs, I don't find a way of displaying tabs as "| " for example if tabs are 2 spaces, to better see alignment (especially in xml files).

Keshav Chand

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Sep 7, 2019, 7:45:40 AM9/7/19

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It would be better if cstr could include regex such as:

syntax keyword int 'i(\d)' conceal cstr='\vℤ$1'

Pim Snel

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Sep 9, 2019, 8:40:24 AM9/9/19

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I could ask around and collect useful use cases to see if it is worth the effort someday in the future.

Forgive me if this is a stupid suggestion. I may have a use case for this feature, but I can not oversee if this features makes it possible. I would like to create a character based image previewer for markdown. E.g. using dotmatrix. It should conceal a markdown image link and show a dynamically created and cached image representation.

Marco Trosi

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Sep 9, 2019, 4:56:12 PM9/9/19

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I don't know why, and it's not a feature request or so, but my brain is now always thinking "SIXEL graphics support in Vim"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel

Pim Snel

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Sep 9, 2019, 5:10:38 PM9/9/19

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I would love this, but it seems far away.

Mark Manning

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Sep 9, 2019, 5:16:42 PM9/9/19

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So of course - the moment I send an e-mail - I remember.

Freebasic.vim file has been updated at vim.org. :-)

Mark Manning

fritzophrenic

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Sep 18, 2019, 8:47:39 PM9/18/19

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@ybearzi:

Here's another use case. When spaces are used instead of tabs, I don't find a way of displaying tabs as "| " for example if tabs are 2 spaces, to better see alignment (especially in xml files).

You don't need conceal for this. Take a look at:

:help 'list'
:help 'listchars'

BertrandSim

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May 21, 2021, 2:28:11 AM5/21/21

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Here's another use case: concealing \frac{a}{b} to {a}/{b}

If cstr supports back-referencing, one could do something like

syn match '\\frac{\([^}]*\)}{\([^}]*\)}' conceal cstr='{\1}/{\2}'

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Marco Trosi

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May 21, 2021, 10:19:58 AM5/21/21

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@brammool I have the feeling cstr is the next big thing that many users seem to need and are waiting for. I saw quite some users work around this "missing" feature but never really successful, and the solutions are more dirty than good. I tried it myself and gave up. The best thing would be to get cstr.