Nvim-Acmetag

This plugin started with inspiration the Plan9 Acme editor, which has this cool concept of "text as actions". This concept allows one to drag text from the editor into the toolbar, which allows them to execute the text as if it were a button.

In Neovim, we can abuse the register system to do something similar. For example, we might run make test often, so we might want this as a "button in our toolbar".

For this usecase, we can use Nvim-Acmetag as follows:

• yank the following into the a register: make test
• execute make test by running lua require("acmetag").run("a")

We can streamline this by nnoremapping -a to that function above, letting execute make test with -a. Here is the config that I use:

;;;; Vim-Acmetag
(let [letters [ "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" "f" "g" "h" "i" "j" "k" "l" "m" "n" "o" "p" "q" "r" "s" "t" "u" "v" "w" "x" "y" "z" ]
      acmetag (require "acmetag")]
  (each [_ letter (ipairs letters)]
    (vimp.nnoremap ["silent"] (.. "-" letter)
                   (lambda [] (acmetag.run letter))))
  (vimp.nnoremap ["silent"] "--" acmetag.display_registers)
  (vimp.nnoremap ["silent"] "- " acmetag.yank_line_to_register)
  )

You may notice that there are two extra functions bound in there: display_registers and yank_line_to_register. These are helper functions that embellish the main functionality:

• display_registers, bound to --, will open a horizontal split showing all bound registers that do not contain newlines.
• yank_line_to_register, bound to - , when executed inside the display_registers output, will copy the text on that line to the register.

For example, display_registers may show something like this:

a: echo hi
b: python3 -i
c: make test

We can change this to the following:

a: echo bye
b: python3 -i
c: make test

If we move our cursor to the first line and execute yank_line_to_register, or - , this will yank echo bye to our a register. Then, executing -a will execute echo bye in a split.