On replacing Telescope with built-in Nvim fuzzy search

[miEsMar]

Lately, I've been working on a super minimalist config as a subset of the already minimalist config.
In that, I realised I could make it without telescope, and instead using custom (simpler) user commands for searching stuff.
Now, I went using Neogit, and realized that the interactive object selection via fuzzy search went away since I dropped the Telescope dependency.
Since Vim/NVim have built-in support for fuzzy matching, why not "replacing" Telescope with it, so that the interactive UI remains even without Telescope dependency?

[CKolkey]

I think I'd be open to supporting that - do you mind making a minimal PoC so I have a better sense of what you mean?

[miEsMar]

So, currently you basically use built-in vim.ui.select():

    vim.ui.select(self.entries, {
      prompt = string.format("%s: ", self.opts.prompt_prefix),
      format_item = function(entry)
        return entry
      end,
    }, function(item)
      vim.schedule(function()
        on_select(self.opts.allow_multi and { item } or item)

        if self.opts.refocus_status then
          refocus_status_buffer()
        end
      end)
    end)

I am not familiar with how to create floating windows, but you could kind of create one (for any operation that does require selecting one item from a list, branches, revisions, etc, so that you can factor out this "operation" and only accept the list as an input), and:

--- Utility function to display a list of items to choose among interactively with Built-in fuzzy search.
---@class SelectionList
---@field items table
---@field fmt_fn fun(item: string)|nil
local function _POC(selection_list)
  -- create a floating window, or whatever you think it best (probably a bottom full-with split?)
  _create_ui_window();
  
  local _list = selection_list.items; -- make a local copy of original list. Needed?? IDK.

  -- First, init UI with full list of items.
  _update_ui_window(_list, selection_list.fmt_fn);  

  -- Then, infinitely loop updating the window content with fuzzy matched.
  -- Store previous and current user input,
  --   to avoid fuzzy matching in case user did not type anything since last check.
  local _prev_pat = ""
  local _curr_pat = ""
  while (true)
    if (SOME_EXIT_CONDITION) then
      break
    end
  
    -- Get user input (fuzzy pattern to match against)
    _curr_pat = _get_user_input_string();
    
    if (_prev_pat ~= _curr_pat) then
      _list = matchfuzzy(_list, _curr_pat);
      _prev_pat = _curr_pat;
    end
    
    -- We might want to always update the UI to make sure we don't break interactiveness.
    _update_ui_window(_list, selection_list.fmt_fn); 
  end
end

Something like this. Hope this gives more ideas.

[miEsMar]

OFC this is indeed a very broken POC, one issue that already came to mind that break things with how I deal with the list is when user cancels part of the pattern due to typos or whatever. In that case, one should check for "backspace" typing, and in case, reset _list to the original one for safety, and restart safely doing fuzzy matching.