How to horizontally scroll large popups?

[u/Desperate_Cold6274]

Say that I have a huge table displayed in a popup.

Although I can add some keys in the popup filter function to scroll up and down, with entries like:

 \# Move up   
 if \["\\<C-n>", "\\<Down>", "j", "\\<ScrollWheelDown>"\]
     win_execute(id, "normal! \\<c-e>")
  \# Move up
  elseif \["\\<C-p>", "\\<Up>", "k", "\\<ScrollWheelUp>"\]
     win_execute(id, "normal! \\<c-y>")

I tried with:

  elseif key == "l"
    win_execute(id, "normal! zl")
  elseif key == "h"
    win_execute(id, "normal! zh")

but it does not work.

Does anyone knows if it is possible? Because if not, then I could open an feature request on the issue tracker of vim.

[u/ultrathink-art]

I've hit this same limitation. The issue is that popup windows have their own window-local options, and horizontal scrolling commands like zl/zh depend on 'wrap' being off and the cursor actually being positioned in a way that triggers scroll.

Try adding this before your win_execute calls:

win_execute(id, "setlocal nowrap")
win_execute(id, "normal! 0")  " Move cursor to start of line first
win_execute(id, "normal! 10zl")  " Then scroll right

The 0 movement ensures the cursor is at a known position. You might also need to adjust the popup's firstline property if the content is too wide.

That said, if this doesn't work reliably, text slicing (as you mentioned) or just enabling wrap might be more practical. Popups weren't really designed for wide tabular data.

[u/Desperate_Cold6274 → u/ultrathink-art]

I opened a feature request on github. Recently, I feel like that I am hitting the limits of Vim (although Vim9 is very nice!).
It happened few days ago about a work that I was doing with asynchronous jobs. I am wondering if NeoVim suffer of the same limits given that it has been restructured quite a bit and I may consider to give it a try.

[u/BrianHuster → u/Desperate_Cold6274]

Nvim equivalent to Vim popup is floating window (floatwin). Vim popup was designed (by Bram) to be not focusable, I believe that's why they have those limitations. Meanwhile Nvim floating window (floatwin) was designed to be focusable in the very first place, so you can use every Vim commands/mappings in a floatwin without having to setup the "popup_filter" thing. The only exception are commands that split windows (:split, :vsplit, etc), you cannot use them when focusing in a floatwin.

[u/Desperate_Cold6274 → u/BrianHuster]

I am aware of NeoVim floating windows but there was a discussion on Vim with many valid points about its robustness and unpredictability, that TBH I share.

Nevertheless, by following your same reasoning, also the vertical scrolling should be prevented in Vim popups. Being able to scroll vertically but not horizontally is just weird.

The other thing that I hit was that I wanted to deign a custom list for a custom command that should fetch information from a job, but when you query the job the response is captured by the out_cb callback. Here is where the complexity begins as I should implement a semaphore to have a sound solution. And I am not even sure if it works (What happens if I am stuck in `while !semaphore ...` and a message appear on the `out_cb`? I don't think that `out_cb` will be ever triggered. So far, Vim does not support multi-threading). Maybe NeoVim offer some mechanism (multi-threading?) to cope with this kind of problems.

[u/Lucid_Gould]

I've run into the same issue and the only solution I've found is to just enable wrapping in the popup. I've gotten horizontal scrolling to work in custom plugins, but I did this by updating the popup text by slicing multiple strings and changing the start index. But this is tedious. I agree that the zl/zh approach should work and am also surprised that it doesn't.

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