wurli/visimatch.nvim

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CREATED

2025-01-11

UPDATED

yesterday

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visimatch.nvim

A tiny plugin to highlight text matching the current selection in visual mode 💫

Highlights are updated whenever the visual selection changes, but visimatch manages to do this without noticeable lag by only searching/applying highlights to the visible regions of buffers. This means that visimatch will continue to work smoothly even when editing very large files. It's magic!

Installation

Using Lazy:

{
    "wurli/visimatch.nvim",
    opts = {}
}

Configuration / Features

Here's the default configuration:

-- Pass this to require("visimatch").setup() or use it as the `opts` field
-- in the Lazy.nvim plugin spec above
opts = {
    -- The highlight group to apply to matched text
    hl_group = "Search",
    -- The minimum number of selected characters required to trigger highlighting
    chars_lower_limit = 6,
    -- The maximum number of selected lines to trigger highlighting for
    lines_upper_limit = 30,
    -- By default, visimatch will highlight text even if it doesn't have exactly
    -- the same spacing as the selected region. You can set this to `true` if
    -- you're not a fan of this behaviour :)
    strict_spacing = false,
    -- Visible buffers which should be highlighted. Valid options:
    -- * `"filetype"` (the default): highlight buffers with the same filetype
    -- * `"current"`: highlight matches in the current buffer only
    -- * `"all"`: highlight matches in all visible buffers
    buffers = "filetype"
    -- Case-(in)nsitivity for matches. Valid options:
    -- * `true`: matches will never be case-sensitive
    -- * `false`/`{}`: matches will always be case-sensitive
    -- * a table of filetypes to use use case-insensitive matching for.
    case_insensitive = { "markdown", "text", "help" },
}

Limitations

Note that visimatch won't trigger in situations where the cursor doesn't move. In particular, this means that entering viw when the cursor is already at the end of the word won't trigger visimatch. In such situations, just move the cursor and highlights will trigger 💫 NB, this is a limitation of Neovim which I don't think is worth adding a workaround for yet. Hopefully this will eventually be addressed on the vim/Neovim side.