Remember buffer layout when resizing

[schveiguy]

Is your feature request about something that is currently impossible or hard to do? Please describe the problem.

I have a 4k monitor attached to my laptop. The screen size is significantly larger on the 4k monitor, and so I sometimes like making my vim window tall to hold more buffers.

When moving the window to my smaller laptop screen, the OS shrinks the window to fit. When moving it back to the big screen, the OS restores the original size. The end result is that buffers at the bottom are shrunk to fit the new size. If the bottom buffer shrinks to one line, then it starts shrinking the second to bottom buffer. After this happens, and the original size is restored, the second to bottom buffer does not expand at all, all new space goes to the bottom buffer.

For my setup, when waking my laptop, for a small amount of time, all windows are displayed on my laptop screen, and then when the external screen wakes up, they are moved back to that screen. This temporary movement means that all my vim windows go through the shrink and grow steps, making all my buffers look squished in the middle.

Describe the solution you'd like

When a resize event occurs, all original buffer sizes should be remembered. If a layout event does not occur before the next resize event, then the original buffer sizes should be restored as possible. That is, the middle buffer should get the extra space until it's as big as it was, and then the bottom buffer gets the space.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I currently run ctrl-w= to equalize all buffers once waking my laptop.

Additional context

This is how a 4-buffer window looks on my 4k screen:

This is how it looks once moved to my laptop screen:

This is how it looks once moved back to the 4k screen:

[chrisbra]

is this a graphical vim? If yes, can you check if :set guioptions+=k changes anything?

[chrisbra]

ah, I think I misunderstood and this is a different problem.

[schveiguy]

OK. I tried it anyway and it didn't change anything.

[brammool]

**Describe the solution you'd like** When a resize event occurs, all original buffer sizes should be remembered. If a layout event does not occur before the next resize event, then the original buffer sizes should be restored as possible. That is, the middle buffer should get the extra space until it's as big as it was, and then the bottom buffer gets the space.

This is actually quite difficult to make work in general. For your specific situation, you could use the VimResized autocommand event to resize windows in the way you like. There are some functions to help with this, such as winlayout(). A more general problem is resizing Vim and positioning windows in the best way possible. Taking into account windows with fixed sizes, multiple tab pages, special buffers (help, quickfix), etc. It gets complicated very quickly. Simplest might be to store the current size (when the windows were last split/closed/resized) and try to keep the same relative size. If done right, then when making the Vim window smaller and then back to the original, windows would be in the same place. However, when running into windows with a fixed size or a minimal size it may not work properly. Perhaps someone would like to spend time on this, it will take some trial and error to make it work well.

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