Tab separator drawing tweak

[sfsam]

I use a fork of this plugin in which I've made a small adjustment to how the tab separator lines are drawn. It's been a while and I'm still using it so I thought I'd share it in case it is something you'd think is worthwhile.

There is an option, g:buftabline_separators, which allows the user to turn tab separator drawing on or off. I've changed this option from a boolean to a number: 0, 1, or 2. The first two options (0 and 1) work like the original boolean. The third (2) draws separators only between adjacent tabs of hidden buffers since those have the same background color. I don't need a separator between the tab of a hidden buffer and the active one since the background colors already provide contrast. In addition, I've added an optional highlight group to allow styling of the separator. In my case, I've used this to make the separator a bit lighter than the text.

Can you tell the difference? Admittedly, this is a small aesthetic tweak and may be of little or no value to others. But I stare at Vim a lot and it has made a difference to me. My fork is here: sfsam@e67df2d.

Thanks for making this! Along with CtrlP I find it indispensable for using Vim. Both should be built-in features.

[ap]

Thank you for that, very nice. This is the sort of attention to design detail I care very much about myself.

As for the code patch: I’m not going to take it as is because it’s perfect for a local patch but not as efficient as I’d want it to be to merge it upstream. The logic needs to be inlined into the preceding and following loops, and the labels should just be constructed appropriately in the first place, instead of adding an extra pass over the array that patches up the labels with substitutions after stridx comparisons with the highlight group. (I’m not surprised you didn‘t do it that way, mind you. It requires much deeper changes, so it’s a bigger investment to write the patch like that and then a higher risk of rejection (or overhaul) over disagreements in specific choices, and it would be much harder to continuously rebase such a patch if that’s what you wound up having to do.)

As far as design considerations: the only thing that comes to mind is that if you have more than 2 windows, there can be more than 2 Active buffers, and their tabs may be adjacent – so shouldn’t there be a separator between them too? I would do it that way; it seems to me the condition should be that the separator should be added for each tab that is in the same state as the preceding tab – which would lead to separators between adjacent active tabs as well as between adjacent hidden tabs. Your code doesn’t work like that – was that just an oversight or a conscious choice, and if the latter, what was your reasoning?

Thanks for making this! Along with CtrlP I find it indispensable for using Vim. Both should be built-in features.

That’s what I was aiming for, so this is high praise. Thank you 🙂

[sfsam]

Awesome.

Your guess about why I wrote it the way I did is correct. I just wanted something easy and maintainable for my personal use - a simple patch. I briefly contemplated doing the required surgery before coming to my senses. My "knowledge" of Vimscript is me reading your plugin and then hitting my head against a wall a lot. I will leave the real scripting to the pros!

It was my oversight to not realize there could be 2 adjacent active tabs. I think your condition for when to draw a separator sounds right. I guess that complicates styling a bit but that can be dealt with.

Thank you for taking the time to consider this!