Updates of ‘mini.surround’: custom surroundings

New features like custom surroundings and search method

Originally posted on Reddit

Hello, Neovim users!

I would like to share with you two new features of ‘mini.surround’, which is one of the many modules of my ‘mini.nvim’ plugin. It is a module for working with text surrounding (think Lua implementation of ‘tpope/vim-surround’ or ‘machakann/vim-sandwich’ but with additional features). It supports add, delete, replace, find, and highlight surrounding. All of this is dot-repeatable and has extra builtin surroundings: ‘function call’, ‘tag’ and ‘interactive’ (prompts user to enter parts). And now it also has two big new features.

Custom surroundings

You can define your own or modify existing surrounding with config.custom_surroundings. This way user can extend setup to meet their needs, like adding brackets with spaces, custom surrounding for Latex command or Lua long brackets ([[...]]), etc. Here is an example:

require('mini.surround').setup({
  custom_surroundings = {
    -- Lua long brackets
    s = {
      -- Configuration for "input" (like for delete) is done with Lua patterns
      input = { find = '%[%[.-%]%]', extract = '^(..).*(..)$' },
      -- Configuration for "output" (like for add) is done with plain text
      output = { left = '[[', right = ']]' },
    },
    -- Use `(` to insert with spaces, `)` will still add without them
    ['('] = { output = { left = '( ', right = ' )' } },
  },
})

So now, for example, typing sds (sd - ‘surround delete’, s - identifier of custom surrounding) will search for Lua’s long bracket and delete it. See documentation for more information.

Search method

Before this feature, ‘mini.surround’ searched only for “covering” surrounding: left part is before cursor, right part - after. Now this behavior is customizable with config.search_method option. So, for example, with its value 'cover_or_next' you can type sd) in the beginning of line aaa (bbb) and it will edit like aaa bbb. Available methods are a more or less simplified version of how ‘wellle/targets.vim’ does it. See documentation for more information.

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Both of these features were long overdue, but I didn’t want to interfere with code much as there are many edge cases. Now that I’ve pulled myself together and written automated tests, it feels much safer to do so.

Please, try this out and tell me what you think!