auto nohlsearch about vim

[romainl]

(mostly for Neovim compatability)

Sigh…

[romainl]

The doc is riddled with "hackish" examples like this so why not one more? I find the idea of adding a small plugin better, though. MacVim releases are lagging a bit so I didn't have a chance to play with your commenting plugin yet but it definitely looks like the way to go.

FWIW, vim-cool was a pretty successful attempt to solve one of my pet peeves with hlsearch: that it lingers on after it stopped being relevant. Whether it is through a built-in plugin, a snippet in the doc, a third-party plugin, or in the core, the problem can be considered solved at this point and, as such, doesn't deserve much attention.

But that still leaves the other one: that the highlighting affects all windows, for which there is no workaround AFAIK. If some effort can be made to improve hlsearch, I think that's where it would be most useful.

[chrisbra]

There is an entry in todo.txt to make 'hlsearch' global/local option. I remember I spent some time several years ago looking into it (but at least back then it wasn't that simple, but I forgot details).

Regarding @habamax request, does it make sense to add this (and possibly also the highlight-yank implementation from the help page) into the vim-scripts library. Not sure if we would be littering the library and if this is a particular good idea or rather a bad one 🤷

[habamax]

I am not sure about library (don't know the purpose of it) but having packadd autonohlsearch should be easy enough to use.

[chrisbra]

alright then can you make this a real PR then please? Please don't forget a bit of documentation and also please leave adjusting 'updatetime' option value alone.

[girishji]

I have something similar in my config, but I prefer 10 sec delay, and also have <esc> do nohls in addition. Maybe you can make the timeout configurable by using autocmd CursorHold * timer_start(timeout - &ut, (_) => feedkeys("\<plug>(nohlsearch)", 'm')).
I also prefer keeping highlights in insert mode as I replace some highlighted fragments (for instance).

[benknoble]

One other note: if hlsearch is made global/local, I’d prefer the default to stay as is (it’s remarkably useful when looking at commit diffs + an open buffer to quickly highlight long function names in all windows, for example).

[habamax]

Maybe you can make the timeout configurable by using autocmd CursorHold * timer_start(timeout - &ut, (_) => feedkeys("\<plug>(nohlsearch)", 'm')).

Wouldn't it trigger if after updatetime but before additional timeout there would be cursor movement? And what if at that time I will search for another thing? Say if there is 6 seconds of additional timeout, I theoretically can do another search which would be "unhighlighted" almost right away. Not sure though.

[girishji]

Wouldn't it trigger if after updatetime but before additional timeout there would be cursor movement? And what if at that time I will search for another thing? Say if there is 6 seconds of additional timeout, I theoretically can do another search which would be "unhighlighted" almost right away. Not sure though.

Correct, there is no good solution. Although I set updatetime to 10 seconds in my profile, it has an undesired effect: the swap file is not written soon enough. Ideally, there should be an independent hlsearchtimeout variable implemented in the core.