Flashing cursor on motions

[rkiyanchuk]

When using vim-airline in Gvim, with any cursor motion the cursor flashes at the last line on the screen for a moment and then comes back to where it's supposed to be. Just like instead of just pressing some motion (let's say l) I would press G^Ol (jump to the last line, come back and move the cursor).

If I disable vim-airline with :AirlineToggle, the behavior comes back to normal.
Also this only happens in Gvim, not in terminal vim.

It's very distractive, the fix would be much appreciated.

[chaficnajjar]

I'm experiencing the same issue with GVim but in my case the issue persists even after disabling vim-airline with :AirlineToggle.

Edit 1: In my case, the cursor motion flashes at the end of the current line, not the last line.

Edit 2: Added two screencasts.

Even when I disable vim-airline the cursor flashes. Seems like my issue is different from the OP's.

[chrisbra]

Is this still reproducible? Can you show a screencapture of the issue?

[rkiyanchuk]

@chrisbra Yes, here's the video

Due to frame rate, some blinks are not visible on the video, but in reality it's happening on every key press.

[klaernie]

@zoresvit could this be caused simply by the fact that you have multiple redraw-heavy options on? The current line and current column highlights are quite heavy, and airline needs to update the line counts. I toyed with current line and column highlighting years ago and disabled them because they were totally slow via ssh connections.

[chrisbra]

I am wondering, if this could be caused by the wordcount extension. That should have been fixed with newer Vim and airline versions. Second, please try with disabling all extensions:

  :let g:airline_extensions = []

[rkiyanchuk]

@chrisbra It seems like @klaernie has the point: disabling cursorcolumn and cursorline stops cursor from jumping, while with :let g:airline_extensions = [] I still observe it. Perhaps it indeed is just too much for redraw to keep up with.

By now I don't think there's any specific bug in vim-airline that could cause it, looks like it's just the matter of overall optimization (not only in vim-airline) and using less plugins :)

Unless anyone has better ideas, I believe this one can be closed.

Thanks for the help!

[nevion]

I have this issue, gvim2. Pretty annoying. Demonstrable with toggling airline on and off while plugin is loaded. Nvidia drivers on a beefy card.

[chrisbra]

Well, that is not what you would usually do, Toggling airline on and off is not really useful and I wouldn't see this as a problem, even if it did flash, since this happens only rarely during a editing session.

[nevion]

I mean it is slow with airline on, and speeds up instantly with airline off and that's doable quick via toggle. Disabling / enabling the extension at the plugin level also achieves the same albeit having to restart vim. It's flashing for me quite a bit, though seems to hate some sessions more than others. Some are unusable for 5-10 seconds while it's doing redraws. vim-qt interestingly along with console live with it fine and fast.

[chrisbra]

can you find out, which extensions fault this is? Do those flashs also go away with empty extensions? what is vim-qt?

[nevion]

vim-qt: https://bitbucket.org/equalsraf/vim-qt/wiki/Home
Happens with the tabline extension enabled, even with all other vim plugins disabled. Disabling that gets rid of the overall issue - in gvim2. Quick retests in gvim gtk3 still has the problem contingent on the tabline extension. qvim (qt-vim) doesn't have the issue in any case.

However tabline seems to break visual select/block edit completely (all gui + konsole with X running). The selections don't happen (yank & paste does nothing).

[chrisbra]

However tabline seems to break visual select/block edit completely (all gui + konsole with X running). The selections don't happen (yank & paste does nothing).

you mean wit the mouse? Because I can block-edit and visual select with the keyboard just fine and I use that feature a lot.

[nevion]

I'll prepare a .vimrc that demonstrates it for me. Can't guarantee I'll have time to find the minimum set that demonstrates the issue but hopefully you'll find something reproducable. The visual select is broken for key navigation, it's as jaring as it sounds.

Themes are the first thing that come to mind.