Toggle bold, italic, and strike styling

[victorkristof]

Hi!

I really like to be able to toggle quotes and list types.

Would it make sense to also enable <Plug>(mkdx-text-bold-n) (and its italic and strike counterpart) to toggle between **text** and text?

Currently, <MAP_PREFIX>b performed on **text** gives ****text****, which isn't really useful.

[SidOfc]

Ahh yeah, I figured this one would pop up someday :)

The thing here is that figuring out the boundaries is sometimes quite tough to do, depending on wether or not a certain applied style (bold / italic) spans multiple lines.

That said one can always u to undo a broken move. And you may be the first to want this (and open an issue about it) but I'm sure you're not alone (I've just lived with removing the marks myself manually too hehe).

I think it's worth a shot, cheers for the suggestion 👍 though as it may be more difficult than expected it may take some time for me to implement, with that I thank you for your patience in advance :)

[samarulmeu]

Will it be possible to toggle between selected text maybe? Just a thought...

[SidOfc]

@samarulmeu I think it would be more effort to first have to select the text and then unmark it, as opposed to just unmarking stuff around the cursor directly.

This is only the case for unmarking though, since it does make sense to start a selection and later figure out where you want it to end, and apply stuff around it after you've selected what you want.

In any case I think basic toggling of say bold/italic/bold-italic using normal mode should be possible and will allow me to stay in the realm of sanity while at it :)

As usual thanks for joining in on the convo, please keep sharing your thoughts if you have them, always appreciated 👍

[samarulmeu]

@SidOfc Thank you for your kind words. I really like the plugin and it replaced some other markdown plugins for me, that is way I am following all the issues trying to help in making it better.

My latest suggestion was based on what I considered to be easier. I think is easy to select text betweend bold or italic mark amd then just toggle them. Having the plugin do the switch in normal mode will ne great, but as I already noted it will be a lot of work.

Anyhow, you have the knife and the knowledge to do it.

[victorkristof]

Thanks @SidOfc and @samarulmeu for the comments! I believe the behavior of this feature could be rather simple (using bold as an example).

1. Case single word: <prefix>b inserts ** around the word under cursor if the word doesn't already have **, and it removes ** if the word is already surrounded by **.
2. Case multiple words: <prefix>b removes ** if the cursor is in a "bold" zone (determined by syntax highlighting I guess?). This is a "destructive" action as it is unclear where to put the ** marks for multiple words. Bolding multiple words would still be performed using visual selection.

What do you think? Does that make sense? Am I forgetting some edge cases or missing anything?

[SidOfc]

@victorkristof indeed that is an amazing suggestion, I never thought about using the syntax highlighting group to detect the boundaries of bold marks! In my mind I was already traversing the file left / right and up / down in order to find boundaries, but this seems like it could make life a whole lot easier and less bug riddled, I will give that a shot hopefully this week as well!

[SidOfc]

Did some more research, while I can actually identify the highlighting group below the cursor, the start / end positions of the highlighting group the cursor is on are not in the results. I've checked :h function-list and it doesn't have any functions for getting them either.

Had some high hopes for that information being given to me by Vim/Nvim but it seems like traversing current line and possibly up/down as well will be the only way to achieve what we want here.

I'll see what I can come up with, but it may take a bit longer because of this 😅

[SidOfc]

I've got a crude working implementation of it now, but because of the way vim applies highlighting (it's inconsistent, ugh) there are some edge cases that need to be taken care of...

basically, given: **hello world**, the text **hello world has the highlighting group markdownBold but the last two ** at the end only have markdownBoldDelimiter 🤦

Aside from that I'm a bit worried about single-character wrapped texts such as **a**, but I can only really start looking at that once I've patched the inconsistency.

For today though, I think I'll leave it at what it is :)

[SidOfc]

Alright, actually pushed through a bit and got it working, this one is also in master now, you can update mkdx normally. Let me know if anything breaks for you, otherwise I think we can also close this one :)

The only thing it doesn't do is handle bold+italic mappings since these are essentially "composite" of a bold+italic marker and the syntax highlighting mkdx applies doesn't respect them as individual parts but rather as a whole, perhaps changing the way its highlighted will fix it though, but I think this can wait until it pops up as a feature request :)

[victorkristof]

That's really great! I have some errors unfortunately :/

1. When I press <localeader>b to bold the word under my cursor, I get this error:

Error detected while processing function mkdx#WrapText[6]..44:
line    4:
E46: Cannot change read-only variable "count"

and then **function(data_set,** replaces the word I want to bold.

2. When trying to toggle some bold text, I get the same error as above (without the function(data_set, thingy). But the text gets unbolded after the error is displayed.

3. Same behavior as 2 when I add a count to bold some text.

[SidOfc]

@victorkristof hmmn that is quite interesting, can you provide a case to reproduce this issue? It could be because I am safeguarding get(v:, 'count1', 1) in my code...

Just opened vim and indeed marking text there doesn't work at the momoent. in Neovim this does work however... I'm on it!

[SidOfc]

hmmn, regular vim (at least mine) refuses to load mkdx all-together now... interesting indeed