Notifications preview not supported by extmarks

[dagl1]

Hi there,

I can't seem to figure out how to make the Notify popup's treesitter/Extmarks highlighting:

Inside the notifications preview this same thing becomes

Inspecting the highlighting, it appears to be fueled by Extmarks, which is not on in the actual preview window. For instance:

Extmarks
  - Title noice

The filetype for one is snacks_notif while the preview is shown with markdown.snacks_picker_preview.

I have changed the filetype in the settings such as mentioned in the style.md, however it appears that i must do something different. Could you potentially point me in the right direction (or is this for whatever reason not possible)?

Thanks in advance,
Dagl

[drowning-cat]

I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to achieve without a concrete example.

According to ⎘ ref, vim.show_pos code uses nvim_echo:

vim.api.nvim_echo(chunks, false, { kind = 'list_cmd' })

[dagl1]

@drowning-cat My apologies, I see how my post is unclear:
I have LSP based highlighting enabled, and when I for instance inspect some code, or produce an error message, the Notify popup is showing that with highlights (first picture). The headings are also highlighted, and when inspecting these highlights (focusing on the Notify window, and calling :Inspect specifically) shows that this is facilitated by Extmarks.

Now when I open the Notifications History, and look at, or enter the Preview of one such Notification (n, then alt+w ), it does not have the same highlighting. Calling Inspect I see that this does not have Extmarks enabled, and this is what brought me to identifying any potential differences.

The filetype could be a complete red herring, but the Notify popup ft = snacks_notif while the Notifications history preview is markdown.snacks_picker_preview.

Here I show both the Notify popup with its highlighting and the same message (partly hidden behind it, but the lack of highlighting is clear) in the Preview of the Notifications History.

My main goal is to get the same highlighting that is shown in the Notify popup, inside the Notifications History Preview. Of course what would be even better is understanding why or how this is facilitated so I can tweak it myself. To note, this is not behavior specific to Inspect. If I do :something then I get an error that in the Notify popup is red, but on inspection in the History Preview is not rendered in red.

Thank you in advance, my apologies for my initial post, and I hope this clears up my question!
-Dagl

[drowning-cat]

No need to apologize, I think it's a valid point. You're probably also using noice.nvim, because I don't think notifier on its own displays :Inspect messages (via nvim_echo) or errors as notification popups.

Yes, Snacks.picker.notifications() uses a fixed markdown filetype for the preview:

snacks.nvim/lua/snacks/picker/source/snacks.lua

Lines 1 to 23 in 882c996

	local M = {}
	---@param opts snacks.picker.notifications.Config
	function M.notifier(opts)
	local notifs = Snacks.notifier.get_history({ filter = opts.filter, reverse = true })
	local items = {} ---@type snacks.picker.finder.Item[]
	for _, notif in ipairs(notifs) do
	items[#items + 1] = {
	text = Snacks.picker.util.text(notif, { "level", "title", "msg" }),
	item = notif,
	severity = notif.level,
	preview = {
	text = notif.msg,
	ft = "markdown",
	},
	}
	end
	return items
	end
	return M

There might be a way to support this with a few small source code changes. I might take a look later.

[dagl1]

Exactly, was thinking it to be only the filetype, when changing it to lua or python, my regular syntax highlighting works. So alternatively I can override it, and create queries specific for most common messages, however it feels like the work has already been done in some way. Interestingly the "snacks_notif" filetype is also only recognised inside snacks itself, as I don't have an autocomplete for it in set ft=... . or alternatively, changing it doesn't make Extmarks do its additional highlighting.

Looking at Noice, I can't find directly how that would be faciltated, other than that it has its own highlighting, so I might try mimicking that if all else fails; https://github.com/folke/noice.nvim

[drowning-cat]

Here is a hacky way to solve the problem:

vim.pack.add({
  { src = "https://github.com/MunifTanjim/nui.nvim" },
  { src = "https://github.com/folke/noice.nvim" },
  { src = "https://github.com/folke/snacks.nvim" },
})

require("noice").setup({})

local ctx_mock = {
  notifier = {
    get_render = function()
      return function(buf, notif, _ctx)
        vim.api.nvim_buf_set_lines(buf, 0, -1, true, vim.split(notif.msg, "\n"))
      end
    end,
  },
}

require("snacks").setup({
  notifier = {
    enabled = true,
  },
  picker = {
    sources = {
      notifications = {
        preview = function(ctx)
          ---@type snacks.notifier.Notif
          local notif = ctx.picker:current().item
          ctx.preview:reset()
          -- ctx.preview:set_lines(vim.split(notif.msg, "\n"))
          local ok = pcall(function()
            local modifiable = vim.bo[ctx.buf].modifiable
            vim.bo[ctx.buf].modifiable = true
            notif.style(ctx.buf, notif, ctx_mock)
            vim.bo[ctx.buf].modifiable = modifiable
          end)
          if not ok then
            Snacks.picker.preview.preview(ctx)
          end
        end,
      },
    },
  },
})

vim.keymap.set("n", "<F1>", function()
  vim.cmd("Inspect")
end)

vim.keymap.set("n", "<F2>", function()
  error("BUG!")
end)

vim.keymap.set("n", "<F3>", function()
  Snacks.picker.notifications()
end)

[dagl1]

You are a wizard!
I am trying to follow this along, however as to why that would suddenly make it work is a bit odd to me, or I should say I don't understand how the single nvim_buf_set_lines (just overriding the current buffer with itself) would change both its filetype and how that then leads Extmarks to become applied.

I removed the preview:reset() and :set_lines part and it remained working, similarly with the fallback, so it appears that changing the style apparently is enough to make this work.
Either way, thank you very much! I will look more into how you made this work so I don't have to be ignorant with my own tinkering.

In particular it does remove other types of highlighting such as (I turned your addition off for this example):

which was facilitated by:

And turned into:

with Extmarks - NONE noice.

I will look at some tinkering to see if both can be active at the same time, and even if this and "config changed" messages aren't highlighted, your fix is already amazing, thanks a lot!

[drowning-cat]

If you take a look at the noice.nvim code:

https://github.com/folke/noice.nvim/blob/7bfd942445fb63089b59f97ca487d605e715f155/lua/noice/view/backend/snacks.lua#L33-L69

you'll see that the style function is responsible for highlighting the notification popup. We simply need to call it for the preview buffer. The only issue is that it requires a context argument because it calls ctx.notifier:get_render()(buf, notif, ctx).

Since snacks.nvim doesn't expose the notifier object, we have to mock it. The style function may access other fields on the notifier table, so this approach isn't guaranteed to work in every case. If it does fail, it simply falls back to the default preview function.

[dagl1]

Thanks a lot! That explains it thoroughly, okay nice, I'll go and see about tinkering with a little more. Really thanks a lot, I don't think I would have gotten to the part where I know to mock it!