How to make gitsigns preview_hunk_inline highlights override render-markdown highlights?

[KaihoCD]

Hi everyone,

I’m wondering if anyone else has run into the same issue as me.
As shown in the screenshot, when I use gitsigns’ preview_hunk_inline mode, the highlights applied by render-markdown are not overridden.

If you have any ideas or workarounds to fix this, I’d really appreciate it!

[MeanderingProgrammer]

The inline preview from gitsigns isn't exactly special. By that I mean gitsigns is doing the same thing this plugin is doing, it's adding extmarks to decorate parts of the buffer. I would have no way of accounting for gitsigns being active on some set of lines and removing my own extmarks. Basically we're doing the same thing and having awareness of each other isn't really possible.

That's the case for additions, but you can actually disable decorations for removed sections. The only reason this is possible is because gitsigns shows removed chunks in a separate buffer inside your current buffer. You can add an override to disable this plugin based on buflisted = false, which will remove decorations in the removed hunk.

There are various workarounds you could build for yourself. My suggestion would be a custom user command which disables this plugin, calls preview_hunk_inline, then on some events re-enables this plugin. Would look something like:

vim.api.nvim_create_user_command('GitsignsInline', function()
    require('render-markdown').disable()
    require('gitsigns').preview_hunk_inline()
    vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd({ 'CursorMoved', 'InsertEnter', 'BufLeave' }, {
        buffer = vim.api.nvim_get_current_buf(),
        once = true,
        callback = function()
            require('render-markdown').enable()
        end,
    })
end, {})

Could bind this to a keymap if you prefer, add a condition to only do the render-markdown stuff in markdown buffers, or whatever else you think makes sense, but this should be a pretty good starting point.

[KaihoCD]

Thank you for your quick response!

I had previously considered using callbacks or similar methods to disable render-markdown when gitsigns is triggered, and then re-enable it by monitoring cursor movement events. I even thought about intercepting gitsigns’ implementation of preview_hunk_inline and rewriting the method. However, both approaches felt too cumbersome to me, and I really dislike having such highly personalized code in my Neovim configuration, as I feel it would make my setup difficult to maintain.

Fortunately, your reply reminded me that I can create a custom command instead — that’s absolutely fantastic! You’re right, this is an excellent starting point!