Colorize terminal buffer preview

[Matts966]

Describe the solution you'd like

It would be awesome to colorize terminal buffer preview for more visibility.

Current previewer does not invoke buffer related autocommands maybe for performance perspective. Could we invoke some color related autocommands only when the buffer is terminal?

[Conni2461]

I would need to restructure some things to make this possible. I talked about it somewhere. Its on my todo list.

But thanks to open a issue to make it trackable :)

[fdschmidt93]

#1120 would fix it if it gets merged (I'm not crazy about it myself). If not, I'm happy to guide anyone who wants authentic terminal buffers in the buffer previewer enough to work on it him/herself to a more principled solution.

[fdschmidt93]

Considering how involved the solution is for such a supposedly innocent issue, I'd kindly ask users who want to see this fix get merged to please test drive #1120

Thank you in advance :)

[tjdevries]

Is the problem that we don't highlight terminal buffers? I'm not sure what's happening here.

Maybe instead we can use the builtin: nvim_open_term to get terminal highlighting?

Sorry, I'm confused about this issue.

[Matts966]

Sorry @tjdevries, I should show some screenshots.

With denite, the preview is simply the terminal buffer itself and colorized.

Telescope buffers is performant, but it shows monochrome terminal preview

This sometimes leads to difficulty in finding terminal buffers with many open buffers.

[fdschmidt93]

@tjdevries Conni and I've got this :) It's quite convoluted.. if you want me to give you the full rundown, happy to elaborate.

[Matts966]

@fdschmidt93
Using latest Telescope buffers perfectly visualize my terminal buffers 🚀
Thank you!!

[fdschmidt93]

PSA: #1120 will essentially be reverted #1400. The original PR introduced a lot of additional maintenance burden and unexpected behavior/side effects we can hardly, if at all, recover from. Therefore, we decided to revert the previewer to how it was before.

[kuator]

PSA: #1120 will essentially be reverted #1400. The original PR introduced a lot of additional maintenance burden and unexpected behavior/side effects we can hardly, if at all, recover from. Therefore, we decided to revert the previewer to how it was before.

😢

[fdschmidt93]

If anyone comes up with a way to extract the lines from a terminal buffer including the ANSI color codes, it would be relatively straightforward. I've spent some time on this and maybe I'm missing something, but I unfortunately haven't yet found a way to do so.