Live content update: update only a specific line/section in the file

[zgibberish]

As far as I'm aware, the API only allows updating the whole file contents with { "content: "..." }. I find that it would be very inefficient / unrealistic to continuously push the whole file contents to Vivify to update the live preview, especially for larger files (over a few hundreds / 1k+ lines).

Are there any existing ways to update only a small section of the file (only send lines that were modified)?

If not, would it be hard to implement something like that?

[jannis-baum]

Are there any existing ways to update only a small section of the file (only send lines that were modified)?

Currently there isn't anything. We were also concerned with that back when we started Vivify and tested it (not super thoroughly, only by "feel") with large files in Vim and Neovim and found that other common plugins would make the editor unusable as the length of the file increased way before Vivify did. Our verdict was that while sending the whole file might feel like a lot it actually isn't in terms of the data (probably only hand-written text) considering it's sent through a local websocket.

If not, would it be hard to implement something like that?

It would definitely make the updating logic more complicated than it is right now but it's not like it would impossible :) Checking out this section of code is probably a good starting point.

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Have you checked if there is a noticeable issue in practice? If so, how big does the file need to be for you to notice it, and is that a realistic scenario?

[zgibberish]

Have you checked if there is a noticeable issue in practice? If so, how big does the file need to be for you to notice it, and is that a realistic scenario?

I was testing with sending content updates on every action (the same as what I did with scroll syncing) in my plugin, and it does lag a lot when working with files over a few hundred lines in length.

Of course that's very unoptimized, doing it every time interval, or only after modifying text would be a lot better, which is what I'm aiming to do.

[jannis-baum]

Alright. For Vim/Nvim we do it whenever the text changes, i.e. still on every keystroke while typing. There it seems to be fine, at least for reasonably short/normal length files. Let me know how it goes!