Labels of dynamic length

[postsolar]

Currently labels can only be 2 characters long.
It wouldn't be hard to make labels' length dynamic.

Pros:

• Would allow smaller sets of characters to be used for labels
• Would guarantee we almost never run out of labels at zz

Cons:

• Somewhat distracting — personally I like labels always and everywhere being the same length

Should be an opt-in feature perhaps.

[postsolar]

This raises a question of what to do when there are labels aa and aaa present — how to execute immediate jump? Possible solutions:

• Only auto-execute the jump if there are no other candidate labels
• Remove auto-executing the jump altogether, make it necessary to confirm input
• Assess the number of labels to be generated and set static label length based on this number. So for a viewport which requires labels aa…zz there would only be 2-character labels, but for a viewport with more words there would only be 3-char labels aaa…zzz and no 2-char labels.
• Some wacky algorithm which would skip over particular labels

Leaning towards option 3.

[postsolar]

Option 1:
➕ Will enable one-key jumps for the very few cases where the number of words is less than the number of characters allowed for use in labels
➖ More logic involved
➖ Inconsistent UI
➖ Tedious to almost always confirm the jump

Option 2:
➕ Very simple
➕ Only need to run labels interpreter script once
➖ Very tedious to always confirm the jump

Option 3:
➕ Will enable one-key jumps for the very few cases where the number of words is less than the number of characters allowed for use in labels
➕ Wouldn't change anything the majority of cases — i.e. those where just two characters are enough
➕ Still no need to confirm the jump
➖ Sometimes most labels would become one character longer just because there are a few extra labels which required an additional character

Option 4:
➕ Still no need to confirm the jump
➖ Complex logic of picking labels
➖ Labels start looking arbitrary and unpredictable — I tried this way in similar plugins and didn't like it

[postsolar]

Another issue is handling overlapping labels. With two-character labels this cannot occur because even if the word itself is 1-character long, there's still always a separating character (whitespace, etc), so no overlaps ever happen. One way to handle this for longer labels would be to only display the first 1 or 2 characters and then to display subsequent characters after the first one(s) was entered. I think that's how hop.nvim handles it. Personally I find it distracting.