Seek advice on the formatting of eldoc buffer

[seraphlive]

This is not a bug of eldoc-box, but rather a minor but annoying formatting issue caused by markdown-mode used by elgot. I've raised jrblevin/markdown-mode#754 to markdown-mode, but while waiting I'd like to ask some advice from you to find a temporary workaround since you are more familiar with eldoc and eglot.

To give you a background about what I was trying to do:

I set eldoc-documentation-strategy to eldoc-documentation-compose to show multiple source of eldoc. For example below buffer has 4 source (elisp-eldoc-var-docstring elisp-eldoc-funcall flymake-eldoc-function embark-eldoc-first-target):

By default there is no blank line to separate each source in eldoc buffer, so I override function eldoc--format-doc-buffer to add one (just add one more \n in the line of when rest do...). This looks nice:

Until I open a buffer with eglot sources (eglot-signature-eldoc-function eglot-hover-eldoc-function python-eldoc-function flymake-eldoc-function emabark-eldoc-first-target):

As you may see, there is one extra blank line from eglot-hover-eldoc-function, which is inconsistent with other sources. This is because of the issue that I've raised to markdown-mode. eglot-hover-eldoc-function use the view mode from markdown-mode to format the code in the lsp documentation with markdown format. And when markdown-mode hides the markup when enabling the view mode, it leaves an extra blank line if the "```" close mark is at the end of the buffer.

I was trying for several days to figure out a work-around to remove the extra blank line for eglot-hover-eldoc-function, but still not find out the correct. Hence I'd like to ask for some advice on how to modify this. Ideally it should be a more general solution to modify the eldoc-buffer or eglot-hover-eldoc-function but a eldoc-box specific method would also be great enough.

Sorry for bothering you with such a wall of text only for a minor format issue. I hope you may have some insight that can save me from this rabbit hole :)

[casouri]

I can't test this, but try

(defun eldoc-box--remove-duplicate-newline ()
  "Compress more-than-3 consecutive newlines."
  (while (re-search-forward (rx (>= 3 "\n")) nil t)
    (replace-match "\n\n")))

(add-hook 'eldoc-box-buffer-hook #'eldoc-box--remove-duplicate-newline)

You can even make eldoc--format-doc-buffer to use a special character rather than a new line as the separator, and replace that special char with a nice separator in eldoc-box-buffer-hook, like shown in #60

[seraphlive]

Thanks for the hints. Although the code can't work because it's not just a "\n" but hidden markup, I saw you've already caught that in your latest update. Also I feel your latter advice is actually better for me, because after trying a language with more redundant documentation like rust, I realize there will be countless newlines anyway. So simply use some dashes instead will work for me.

I also updated to the latest version of eldoc-box. The refined buffer looks nice but I notice something strange:

eldoc-box-help-at-point looks correct:

but eldoc-box-hover-mode doesn't:

Two things: 1. The function name is missing. This only happens to elisp's eldoc and eglot has no problem. 2. My own separator is missing :)

I basically use original eldoc and manually call eldoc-box-help-at-point so it's OK for me but I feel you may want to take a look into this. If it's just my mis-configuration instead of a bug, please feel free to close this issue. Thanks.

[casouri]

Yeah, in eldoc-box-hover-mode, eldoc gives us a list of docs and we combine them into a single string ourselves, so your modification wouldn't take effect. I added a variable eldoc-box-doc-separator that you can customize.

Unfortunately this new variable wouldn't affect eldoc-box-help-at-point, so you need to keep your hack on eldoc.

As for the disappearing function name, it should be fixed now!

[seraphlive]

Works perfect now. Thanks!