Fenester
A Vim plugin for resizing windows in a sane way
Rationale
Like a lot of my recent personal projects, this project is inspired by my lack of a large enough working memory.
It's difficult for me to keep all the things I want to in my head at once: Typically I need to remember between 3 and 10 different scopes and data types at a time. This is, perhaps, indicative that I'm not very good at architecting code, but I have to deal with it gracefully nonetheless.
Vim windows can help: If you can have multiple text buffers on the screen at once, who needs to remember anything?
But there are two problems with this:
- Vim has really annoying algorithms for resizing splits, especially when the window changes shape.
- You can only fit a fairly small number of windows in your tab/frame at once.
I recently stumbled upon the golden-ratio plugin,
which kind of fixes these problems, but has
extremely annoying defaults, in my opinion.
So I made something with saner defaults.
Design
Fenester tries to force your windows to be reasonable shapes. Windows are sized according to their contents; i.e. a window with 80-character lines will naturally scale up more slowly than a window with 100-character lines.
Fenester first tries to ensure that the focused window has its text entirely visible. Once that's accomplished, it tries to ensure that the other windows also have their text visible. If that's also possible, it uses the focused window to fill the rest of the space.
There are some complexities hidden by the above description, but it's what I was trying to approximate when writing the plugin.
Current issues
-
Fenester is written entirely for me. It is, therefore, entirely non-configurable - when I want to tweak a value, I edit the source.
-
It is also ridiculously slow. It could easily be sped up by actually thinking about the algorithms involved, or by doing something even simpler (e.g. memoizing functions)
-
The code is terrible. I hacked this together as fast as I could, and never looked back.
-
There may be some subtle off-by-one errors in the code. In fact, I'm pretty sure there are.
-
I mostly don't care if other people use fenester, so I haven't created a fancy screencast or anything. If you want to make one, or if you want me to make one, I'd probably be happy to. I just have to find some spare time around somewhere.
-
Fenester doesn't care about buffer types or any kind of advanced vim stuff - all windows are equal. This is probably super-annoying if you use a bunch of fancy plugins.
-
Probably lots more
If you want to address any of these issues (without modifying the default behavior too much - remember, this is a project entirely written for me), I'll gladly accept any and all PRs.
Recommended installation
Fenester defines only one command, FenArrange. This
command looks at the current and all windows, and
sets the window dimensions in-place. It can by
installed with vim-plug as follows:
In your .vimrc:
call plug#begin()
...
Plug 'benwr/fenester'
...
call plug#end()
au WinEnter * FenArrange
au VimResized * FenArrange