Exact match highlighting about vim-grepper HOT 7 CLOSED

Oh, and in case you're wondering why not just add what user searched for to the / register - because this wouldn't work with regex searches.

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Do you know that there's simple highlighting support already? It's enabled by :Greppers -highlight flag. (See :h :Grepper.)

Simple because it indeed uses the / register, although it should handle simple cases of .* and a few other patterns just fine. It's a "good enough" approach that doesn't rely on external tools.

Put this in your vimrc to turn on highlighting for :Ag:

command! -nargs=* -complete=file Ag Grepper -noprompt -highlight -tool ag -query <args>

As for the other suggestions:

• Way 1: But how do you "search" the output line to even get the starting column when using regexp? To get an exact answer, you'd have to use the same tool again. And then you have the same problem again: no ending column. (Some tools don't even report the starting column.)
• Way 2: No, just no. :-) Parsing ANSI escape sequences only leads into a deep, deep rabbit hole. Some tools might not even provide coloured output.

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@mhinz First of all I've tried enable highlight via g:grepper, but it didn't work out for some reason.

About the first way. Ag can report starting column. You don't need to search for it youself. Then, as I've said - you can make Ag output match only and from that you can get the length of match. Start column + length = end column. And there it is - you arguments for the matchpos ready.
Unfortunately I know only basics of vimscript, so most of you code is mumbo jumbo to me, so I can't add this myself in any reasonable time, but this shouldn't be hard to do, right?

What's harder to do is display the whole line in quick fix with this approach. I don't really need that myself, but other people probably would prefer this. This is also achievable. We can just take line numbers from ag output and get this lines manually from all files with matches.

I sense that you will say something like "this is too much work", "no one really needs this", so would you at least accept pull request with this feature sometime?

And I don't like things that's "good enough" when there's clearly a way to make them better. Never settle on the mediocracy.

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First of all I've tried enable highlight via g:grepper, but it didn't work out for some reason.

What was the exact line? A quick test with let g:grepper = { 'highlight': 1 } and searching for "foo" afterwards worked just fine.

And I don't like things that's "good enough" when there's clearly a way to make them better. Never settle on the mediocracy.

Well, this misses the point. The approach wasn't chosen because it's easier to implement, but because it works the same for all supported tools and tools added by the user. It's the best approach given a certain design and has nothing to do with mediocracy.

Ag can report starting column. You don't need to search for it youself. Then, as I've said - you can make Ag output match only and from that you can get the length of match.

And as I've said, that might not work for other tools, which is my main grief, since I don't like adding too much tool-specific code.

Nevertheless I'm open to adding "exact highlighting". Let me play around with this idea for a bit and see if I encounter any technical problems.

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@mhinz Thanks, will be glad if this would be added.

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I played around with the idea for a bit, but all solutions seem quite flakey to me.

Nevertheless I let the issue open in case someone wants to have a try on it.

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I'm closing this since I'm going into maintenance mode for this plugin. I'll still fix bugs but I won't add new features on my own.

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