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Regexp Railroad Diagrams

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#38 opened on Feb 1, 2022

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Description

What? I’m a refugee from Atom and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my experience with Neovim so far. I’m down so a scant few of my favourite Atom features I’ve yet to find answers for with nvim. One of those features is atom-regex-railroad-diagrams 2. With this atom plugin installed, any time the cursor is on a regular expression, a graphical railroad diagram 4 appears at the bottom of the window.

Is there something comparable for neovim? Surely, terminal-based plugins would have to use ascii art or something like that, but perhaps something could be done anyways?

Some cursory googling didn’t turn up much, there’s too much history with vim and regexp search terms to break through the noise of ‘how to regexp in vim’ tutorials.

see also https://neovim.discourse.group/t/regexp-railroad-diagrams/1984/3

Why? Regexp is confusing, railroad diagrams help

Potential existing implementations:

Potential pitfalls: issue linked above - railroad-diagrams library could be adapted, but it wouldn't be trivial

Contributor guide

Research direction
Explore existing terminal based regex visualization tools. Study the Neovim API for extending the editor. Check if there's a Lua port of the railroad diagrams library or adapt it to output ASCII art. Consider using inccommand as a reference for real time updates.
Tech stack
lua
Domain
developer experience
Issue type
Feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
3
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
1-2 days
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
Active
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
Clear
Prerequisites
LuaNeovim plugin developmentRegular expressions
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
45