ivy.el: hydra-style action prompt

[ericdanan]

In case you find it useful (it is useful to me for ivy-read commands with many actions).

There is really just one commit, I probably did something wrong to end up with two identical ones. Let me know if you need me to make changes.

• Add a custom variable ivy-action-display-style to optionally toggle
  the use of a hydra-style docstring as hint in the ivy-read-action
  minibuffer prompt.
• Add a variable ivy--action-hints-lists and a command
  ivy-set-action-hint to customize this string globally or
  per command. This gives some flexibility to arrange the layout of the
  action prompt, which can be useful especially for commands with a large
  number of actions.
• Add a function ivy-hydra--make-action-hint which is called by
  ivy-read-action to build the docstring when ivy-action-display-style
  is set to 'hydra. This function is defined in ivy-hydra.el since it
  depends on the hydra package, and is autoloaded in ivy.el.

[abo-abo]

Looks to me like a whole lot of complexity to customize a face. Or am I missing something?

[ericdanan]

Sorry, I think I was not clear. My purpose is not to change the font of the action key, it is be able to structure the layout of the actinos. For instance I have a counsel-projectile function with lots of actions (see #471) and I can then spread them on several columns, add column headers and so on.

But you may be right that it is too complex for a small benefit.

For the record, another possibility (this is what I first did) is to have a full-blown that not only generates the hint but also runs ivy-done or ivy-call, ie completely replaces ivy-dispatching-call and ivy-dispatching-done (we can have s single hydra replacing both). I think this also makes it possible to select actions with multiple letters, but I didn't use it because I don't have commands with that many actions. Then I tried to simplify things a bit by only using the hydra docstring, but it might still be too heavy.

[abo-abo]

but it might still be too heavy.

I can just make this into a lambda:

(concat (if (eq this-command 'ivy-read-action)
                               "Select action: "
                             ivy--current)
                           "\n"
                           (mapconcat
                            (lambda (x)
                              (format "%s: %s"
                                      (propertize
                                       (car x)
                                       'face 'ivy-action)
                                      (nth 2 x)))
                            (cdr actions)
                            "\n")
                           "\n")

And let the user override it. Would that work for you?

[ericdanan]

Yes that would of course work for me by overriding the lambda. Thanks a lot.

[abo-abo]

Have a look, hope it works for you.

[ericdanan]

Yes it works perfectly, thank you!