Pager live preview about glow

[muesli]

Agreed, that would be nice.

[shitchell]

Another thing that, imho, would be important is to maintain the scrolling position. When you're editing a really long document you don't want to scroll back to the position of the last change every time.

Totally agreed. in pager.go, you can update the current document by editing the contents of m.currentDocument.Body. Then you run renderWithGlamour(m, m.currentDocument.Body) to re-render/update the view. And it keeps the current position :) As an example, you could drop this into pager.go beneath switch msg.String() { and just above case "q", "esc":

case "1":
	m.currentDocument.Body = m.currentDocument.Body + "\n\nhere's a new line."
	cmd = renderWithGlamour(m, m.currentDocument.Body)
	cmds = append(cmds, cmd)

Then launch glow, open a file, and type "1" repeatedly. It'll keep appending lines to the end of the document, but as the file changes, the scroll position remains the same.

[mschloesser]

I would love to see this feature too! I tried to fiddle with watch and some quick and dirty helper scripts but an actual "live preview" would be great.

[BachoSeven]

This would close #135 as well.

[Lisiadito]

I would love to see that feature as well.
@mschloesser can you share your script until the feature is implemented? Because I didn't get it to work with watch.

[shitchell]

I feel like this shouldn't be too hard.

https://medium.com/@skdomino/watch-this-file-watching-in-go-5b5a247cf71f

Code would go in pager.go. First, you check to see if the document is stashed or not. If it's not, then using fsnotify, you could create a file watcher to detect any edits to m.currentDocument.localPath. Any time there's an edit, re-read the the contents of m.currentDocument.localPath and update m.currentDocument.Body. Re-render the doc, and you're good.

No promises that I won't get distracted or otherwise not get around to it, but I'll probably look at this over the weekend.

[shitchell]

So we've got 3 parts to this:

1. Initialize a watcher (should only happen once after you launch glow)
2. Add a new filepath to the watcher (should happen each time you view a local file)
3. Remove a filepath from the watcher (should happen each time you stop viewing a local file / return to file list)

@meowgorithm @muesli

Do you guys have any suggestions where each step should live? I'm thinking first add the watcher as an attribute of pagerModel. setContent() gets run every time we both open a new file and when we re-render the document (e.g. after detecting a file change). I don't think there presently exists a single method that runs only when we first open a file, so perhaps add another attribute to pager like isViewingFile bool, and then add a block to setContent() such as:

if !isViewingFile:
  isViewingFile = true
  if isLocalFile:
    addWatcher(currentFilePath)

and then toggle isViewingFile to false and remove the watcher whenever you call unload(). Does that seem reasonable? Or would there be a better way to implement this? Since I'm still not super familiar with the code, I wanted to ask before implementing it :P

[mschloesser]

I would love to see that feature as well.
@mschloesser can you share your script until the feature is implemented? Because I didn't get it to work with watch.

@Lisiadito Unfortunately, I deleted the scripts since it didn't really work well.

Another thing that, imho, would be important is to maintain the scrolling position. When you're editing a really long document you don't want to scroll back to the position of the last change every time.

[morpheusthewhite]

Temporary (or maybe not) solution for those who needed this feature to integrate glow it with a terminal editor such as vim: there is this nice plugin https://github.com/npxbr/glow.nvim

[muesli]

Closing a few tickets describing the same feature. Let's track this in #135, which was the first ticket suggesting it.