The one-trick pony of searching.

🔎 onesearch.nvim

"Oh, sure, it can do anything you want." said the old man

"As long as what you want is what it does."

Why onesearch.nvim?

Plugins like easymotion make moving through text a pleasure. However, after trying many different ones I haven't found one that fits my needs perfectly. So I've decided to make it myself. Features of onesearch include:

• simplicity: the actual code is <500 lines in a single file. Feel free to take a look, there are comments too!
• opinionated: no complex configuration needed. It doesn't try cover all your needs, but insted focus on one use case.
• realistic: we are not machines (yet?), we make mistakes and mistype. Embracing that allows to recover quickly.
• visual: controls are simple (3 keys) but the interface is rich. Use color and simple animations to be clear about what's happening.

📦 Installation

Requires neovim >= 0.8

Using vim-plug

Plug 'lfrati/onesearch.nvim'
  nmap / :lua require('onesearch').search()<CR>
  vmap / :<C-u>lua require('onesearch').visual_search()<CR>")

Using packer

 use { 'lfrati/onesearch.nvim', config = function()
        vim.keymap.set("n", "/", ":lua require('onesearch').search()<CR>")
        vim.keymap.set("v", "/", ":<C-u>lua require('onesearch').visual_search()<CR>")
end }

Using lazy

{ 'lfrati/onesearch.nvim', config = function()
        vim.keymap.set("n", "/", ":lua require('onesearch').search()<CR>")
        vim.keymap.set("v", "/", ":<C-u>lua require('onesearch').visual_search()<CR>")
end }

⚙️ How it works

Onesearch has only one main function search(), which dims the text on screen and starts an interactive string search. As you type the matches in the currently visible area are highlighted, if there is only a single match the color will change.

Single match	Multiple matches	Hints

Pressing <Tab> will loop through groups of matches (<S-Tab> will go back). Upon pressing <CR> the search ends and the jumping begins. The highlight changes to red, showing single char hints that can be used to jump to the matches. If there is only a single match visible it will jump immediately.

While searching for a pattern, errors (i.e. chars that lead to no matches) are shown in red. Note: characters in the search patter are escaped so that every search is literal, no weird regex trickery, just good ol' strings of code.

Multiple matches + errors	Single match + errors

You can delete all the errors with a single press of <BS> and continue searching. Also when a target is chosen the corresponding line flashes briefly. This is helpful in case of typos while selecting the target because it avoids losing track of the cursor.

Landing Flash	S-Tab Flash
landing_flash.mov	s-tab_flash.mov

🎁 Extra goodies

• populate / register : use n to quickly search for more matches ( see :help quote_/ )
• set m` : use `` or '' to go back where you came from ( see :help mark-motions )
• embrace laziness: don't feel like deleting errors? just <CR>! don't feel like picking char? just <CR>!
• up to 324 default hints : use pairs of hints to select from a large pool of matches, only when needed.
• add customizable margin above top search to improve readability while tabbing
• store previous searches and retrieve them with UP/DOWN (Thanks to @Nithe14)
• pass text to start the search function (Thanks to @Nithe14)

Select first char	Select second char

🛠 Configuration

What can I change?

• Don't like the default colors? Pick your own.
• Don't want flashes? Set flash_t to zero.
• Don't like the chars used for hints? Provide your own¹.

require("onesearch").setup{
    flash_t = 150,                         -- how long flash lasts upon landing, set to 0 for no flash
    scrolloff = 5,                         -- margin to leave above top match while tabbing around
    hl = {
        overlay = "OnesearchOverlay",      -- highlight for the background during search
        multi = "OnesearchMulti",          -- highlight for multiple matches
        single = "OnesearchSingle",        -- highlight for single match
        select = "OnesearchRed",           -- highlight for hints during target selection
        flash = "OnesearchFlash",          -- highlight for landing flash
        error = "OnesearchRed",            -- highlight for no-matches flash
        current_char = "OnesearchCurrent", -- highlight for char to be chosen from pair
        other_char = "OnesearchOther",     -- highlight for other char in the pair
        prompt_empty = "OnesearchYellow",  -- highlight for prompt upon empty search pattern
        prompt_matches = "OnesearchGreen", -- highlight for default prompt
        prompt_nomatch = "OnesearchRed",   -- highlight for non-matching prompt
    },
    prompt = ">>> Search: ",               -- prompt header
    hints = { "a", "s", "d", "f", "h", "j", "k", "l", "w", "e", "r", "u", "i", "o", "x", "c", "n", "m" }
}

🏗️ Design

The design of onesearch revolves around simplicity. No trying to decrypt arcane VimL incantations. Just some simple effective Lua. The plugin looks for matches in the visible lines plus one more match (if present) to guide forward searches. This means that the file size doesn't really matter, only your window size. This is also why we disable fancy broad regexes in favor of specific code strings. Hinting is also designed around simplicity. The same code used to show matches and errors, is used to show single or double hints (e.g. match -> hint1, errors -> hint2). Less code, fewer bugs, less confusion and less time needed to improve the experience. The single search function offered (and actually exported) is wrapped in a pcall so that the cleanup will always take place. The plugin implements a simple finite state automata controlled by only 4 main keys: CR, BS, S-TAB, TAB.

graph TD
    A(START) -->|overlay| B(read char)
    B -->|ESC| C(END)
    subgraph pattern
        B --> |char| E(grow) --> B
        B --> |BS| F(shrink) --> B 
        F --> |empty + BS| C
        B -->|S?TAB| G(move view) --> B
        B -->|ENTER| D{Accept}
    end
    subgraph marks
        D --> |single match|J
        D --> |multiple matches|H(read char)
        H --> |char|J(JUMP)
    end
    H --> |ESC|C

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• easymotion
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Footnotes

1. Hints are applied top-to-bottom, beacuse when you tab around your cursor is set to the top one. ↩