Today I tried to push forward on refactoring the scene_viewer to add a clap based argument for rendering the scene into an image. I ended up biting off more than I could chew and have rolled that work back.

On the side though I took a look at the newly released Neovim 0.9 which includes scroll_delta data in the viewport events. This was a field introduced in part for Neovide to get better smooth scrolling.

With the existing implementation, Neovide uses the top line of the rendered screen as reported by the viewport event to decide where to draw the new content. The hope being that if the user has scrolled the screen, the new content will be inserted into the correct place visually and can be animated into view.

This works for simple buffers but falls apart when lines are soft wrapped or when there are folds because there will be larger jumps in the top line than the view should actually be scrolled. The scroll_delta field addresses this by including an amount to scroll the screen by irrespective of the actual top line and which takes into account the folds and soft wraps.

To take advantage of this new data, I swapped the snapshots off of using the topline and instead stored a vertical position float. Any time a viewport event is recieved which has a scroll_delta, a snapshot is taken with a vertical position adjusted by the scroll_delta so that it can be rendered in the correct place.

In my manual testing, this does fix the softwrap issues I encountered in the original approach, but when talking with contributors there are still problems with folds that I haven't tracked down yet.

Tomorrow I may pull down another project from the shelf to work on to build some steam back up after my failure today, but we will see what I'm up for as the day is likely to be pretty busy.

Till tomorrow,
Kaylee