Please follow the Angular commit style in your commit messages so that the automatic version numbering can work.
The plugin files will be cloned somewhere under ~/.vim by your plugin manager.
For example Plug places them in ~/.vim/plugged/pathfinder.vim/.
Some plugin managers also allow you to clone the repository into a directory of your choice and use the path to that directory to install the plugin.
The pathfinding algorithm used is Dijkstra's algorithm, which is just a greedy algorithm. Vertices are generated on-the-fly rather than building the entire graph beforehand.
Each vertex in the graph is a tuple of (view, most recent motion). view is
the result of winsaveview() in Vim: this includes both the cursor and scroll
positions. We need to store the most recent motion because it is used to
calculate certain weights - 2fk should be cheaper than fkfy.
Vim (when compiled with +python3) comes with an embedded Python module called
vim, which is used to send commands and output from Python.
In Vimscript, the following syntax is used to call Python code:
python3 <line of code>python3 << endpython
<multiple lines of code>
endpythonThe way we discover connections between nodes (characters) in the pathfinding graph is:
- Move the cursor to the node position
- Run the motion with
silent! normal! <motion> - Check where the cursor moved to and record it as a connection
This causes the cursor to move around while things are being tested. We want to allow users to continue working while paths are found, hence we start a "server" which is basically another Vim process using this barebones vimrc.
The user's Vim (the client) sends the contents of the current buffer, the start
and target positions, the window dimensions and some other information to the
server when it wants to request a path. This communication happens through
multiprocessing.connection with a temporary file.
The server will then do pathfinding in the background and send the result back when it is done, which the client receives and displays.