Shedding light on your cursor location when you have lost it in the muck
This plugin provides a user-command called PingCursor which illuminates the
current location of the cursor temporarily so that you can easily find it.
Please see the Mappings section for details on how best to utilize the
PingCursor command.
The following is the recommended approach using the vim8's built in package management. If you aren't using vim8 then upgrade to get the latest goodness.
cd ~/.vim/
git submodule add https://github.com/uptech/vim-ping-cursor.git pack/bundle/start/vim-ping-cursor
git add .
git commit -m "Added vim-ping-cursor plugin to my setup."
If you are using another method, you are on your own.
The recommended mapping for this plugin is to simply map a key combo to run the
PingCursor command for you. This can easily be done by adding the following
to your ~/.vimrc.
nnoremap <leader>p :PingCursor<cr>
In the above example I map my normal mode <leader>p key combo to execute the
PingCursor command, in turn highlighting the current location of my cursor
momentarily.
You can of course map this command anyway you like, or even choose not to map it and just execute the command as follows when you need it.
:PingCursor<cr>
The duration of the cursor flash can be customized in your ~/.vimrc:
" This is the default
let g:ping_cursor_flash_milliseconds = 250
Let me start out by explaining a scenario that happens to me at work on a relatively regular basis. I often find myself working deep in the thicket of code, when all of the sudden I am distracted by another co-worker asking a question or simply making some noise. I found not being able to find my cursor quickly frustrating.
So, I thought to myself, I wonder if Vim has cursor row
highlighting or possibly even cursor column highlighting. Sure enough
Vim has both and enabling them was as simple as setting
the following in my .vimrc.
set cursorline
set cursorcolumn
It turns out, the cursorcolumn option when enabled causes the full screen to
redraw. You might be thinking to yourself, that should not be a problem, I
have a very fast machine and it is just some text. I am sorry to inform you
that you are wrong. It turns out that redrawing the full screen is quite
costly in Vim. More importently redrawing the full
screen interacts with lots of other features like cursor movement, Ctrl-p
based completion, and many others. This means that if you have cursor
highlighting on and use any of those features your Vim
performance will tank during those operations.
The following are a number of threads, blogs, etc. where I found people discussing this issue and trying to come up with work arounds for this issue.
- http://vim.1045645.n5.nabble.com/Vim-7-slows-down-when-highlighting-cursor-line-td1148280.html
- https://gist.github.com/pera/2624765
- http://briancarper.net/blog/590/cursorcolumn--cursorline-slowdown
After testing out a number of these work arounds I finally ended up deciding to use the cursor pinging solution described in Brian Caprer's blog post and create a Vim plugin so other people could easily obtain this work around.
Most of the credit here should go to Brian Carper because he provided a very valuable blog post that I used as the basis for this vim plugin.
Credit must also go out to all the others out there that struggled with this issue as I did and dug in to Vim enough to understand what was actually happening.
Copyright (c) Andrew De Ponte. Distributed under the same terms as Vim itself.
See :help license.
