🚀 Keybinding to jump between files in navigate mode

[tjkirch]

Would it be possible to add additional keybindings that jump to the next or previous file in a diff? Some files have many diff hunks (such as generated files, like Cargo.lock in Rust) and it'd be nice to be able to skip down to the next file.

I see that the keybindings for navigating hunks insert a search pattern in less's history, and I don't see a way for less to have multiple patterns or keybindings, so I couldn't personally see a way without switching pager.

[dandavison]

Hi @tjkirch! I think you're right -- it looks like we need to expose a bit more control over the details of the navigate regexp. E.g. unmerged commit dfc149c gives us distinct labels for file and hunk boundaries, but we also need to give users the ability to alter the regex itself that delta seeds less with, in order to specify stopping on file boundaries only.

[ghost]

@dandavison I think it's also worth thinking about the order of the labels in the regex.
If we have

^(commit|added:|removed:|renamed:|Δ|δ)

(the hunk label is last), it will be easy to switch to jumping by files by pressing /, Up, and removing the last couple of chars and pressing Enter.

[dandavison]

Nice @lepotic. Thanks very much for that suggestion. I've made your change and opened PR #684. I'm thinking that gives us a pretty workable solution; @tjkirch @lepotic what do you think? #684 PR description copied below:

---

Fixes #680 cc @tjkirch @lepotic

This changes the labels that delta adds when navigate = true: we now have an upper-case delta on file boundaries, and a lower-case delta on hunk boundaries:

As suggested by @lepotic #680 (comment), this allows us to switch to navigating by file with / <up> <left> <backspace> <backspace> <enter>.

In other words, using / <up> to reveal the current search regex:

/^(commit|added:|removed:|renamed:|Δ|δ)

and then editing this to remove the lower-case delta:

/^(commit|added:|removed:|renamed:|Δ)

and finally resuming search with <enter>.

The labels can be modified. E.g.

[delta]
    file-modified-label = @
    hunk-label = *

(and it is ok to use something like * which has special meaning in regular expressions).

[dandavison]

Released in 0.9.0 (I changed the default value of hunk-label to a bullet rather than a lowercase delta)