Intro
GitLens is a VSCode plugin that, among other things, allows you to see the time, commit author, and commit message of the current line. With a little help from to the neovim api and our shell, it we can recreate this functionality in a few lines of lua code.
The Code
-- in utils.lua
local M = {}
local api = vim.api
function M.blameVirtText()
local ft = vim.fn.expand('%:h:t') -- get the current file extension
if ft == '' then -- if we are in a scratch buffer or unknown filetype
return
end
if ft == 'bin' then -- if we are in nvim's terminal window
return
end
api.nvim_buf_clear_namespace(0, 2, 0, -1) -- clear out virtual text from namespace 2 (the namespace we will set later)
local currFile = vim.fn.expand('%')
local line = api.nvim_win_get_cursor(0)
local blame = vim.fn.system(string.format('git blame -c -L %d,%d %s', line[1], line[1], currFile))
local hash = vim.split(blame, '%s')[1]
local cmd = string.format("git show %s ", hash).."--format='%an | %ar | %s'"
if hash == '00000000' then
text = 'Not Committed Yet'
else
text = vim.fn.system(cmd)
text = vim.split(text, '\n')[1]
if text:find("fatal") then -- if the call to git show fails
text = 'Not Committed Yet'
end
end
api.nvim_buf_set_virtual_text(0, 2, line[1] - 1, , {}) -- set virtual text for namespace 2 with the content from git and assign it to the higlight group 'GitLens'
end
function M.clearBlameVirtText() -- important for clearing out the text when our cursor moves
api.nvim_buf_clear_namespace(0, 2, 0, -1)
end
return M
" in init.vim
lua vim.api.nvim_command [[autocmd CursorHold * lua require'utils'.blameVirtText()]]
lua vim.api.nvim_command [[autocmd CursorMoved * lua require'utils'.clearBlameVirtText()]]
lua vim.api.nvim_command [[autocmd CursorMovedI * lua require'utils'.clearBlameVirtText()]]
hi! link GitLens Comment
Top comments (1)
Great article! I appreciate the explanations within the code. I encountered a few stumbling points that I thought I would bring up for any others that encounter similar issues:
It looks like on the line where you're displaying the text, you're missing the text to display. This line:
api.nvim_buf_set_virtual_text(0, 2, line[1] - 1, , {})what worked for me (after much trial and error) was this:api.nvim_buf_set_virtual_text(0, 2, line[1] - 1, {{text}}, {})this is because the 4th argument is an array of tables, which is basically just tables within a table...One other point of note, this line:
local cmd = string.format("git show %s ", hash).."--format='%an | %ar | %s'"if you're on Windows, you will want to change the single quotes to backslashed double quotes because cmd doesn't play well with the single quotes:local cmd = string.format("git show %s ", hash).."--format=\"%an | %ar | %s\""