Visual mode counting

[diniamo]

I've just set feline.nvim up, and it's great - exactly what I was looking for. I failed to create components that I still want to though:

The first one would count how much stuff is selected in visual mode (characters if only selected in one line, lines if selecting multiple lines, width and height if selecting a block). There is functionality for this in noice.nvim (which is where I got the idea from), but I couldn't find it in the codebase, because it's probably 20 levels of abstractions deep in another repo, but I would still like to have a custom implementation instead of using that.

[freddiehaddad]

This is outside of my Vim API knowledge so I could be way off here.

If you look at the API documentation for vim.fn.getpos, it mentions the '< and '> markers represent the start and end of a visual selection.

Each call returns a table of values:

[bufnum, lnum, col, off]

Perhaps with some arithmetic, you can determine the selection?

For example,

local start_pos = vim.fn.getpos("'<")
local end_pos = fin.fn.getpos("'>")

local start_line = start_pos[2]
local end_line = end_pos[2]

local start_col = start_pos[3]
local end_col = end_pos[3]

local lines_selected = end_line - start_line
local cols_selected = end_col - start_col

NOTE: I have not tested this AT ALL! This is just me looking at the doc and trying to provide a starting point. :)

[diniamo]

Thanks! That's broken for a few reasons because the Vim API is apparently a mess. Here is what I came up with:

function()
  local mode = vim.fn.mode()
  if mode == "v" then
    local start_line = vim.fn.line("v")
    local end_line = vim.fn.line(".")

    if start_line == end_line then
      return tostring(math.abs(vim.fn.virtcol(".") - vim.fn.virtcol("v")) + 1)
    else
      return tostring(math.abs(end_line - start_line) + 1)
    end
  elseif mode == "V" then
    return tostring(math.abs(vim.fn.line(".") - vim.fn.line("v")) + 1)
  elseif mode == "�" then
    return math.abs(vim.fn.virtcol(".") - vim.fn.virtcol("v")) + 1 .. "x" .. math.abs(vim.fn.line(".") - vim.fn.line("v")) + 1
  else
    return ""
  end
end

It's a little unreadable since I've already inlined everything for optimization.