Quick way to remove scratch buffers?

[gonstoll]

The more I use snacks the more I like it ❤️ in particular, I really like the scratch module! Tho I have a quite cumbersome way to remove scratch buffers 🫤 I just rm -rf ~/.local/share/nvim/scratch and remove all, which is not ideal. Ideally it'd be nice to be able to remove them from the list. I use fzf-lua, and something I do often is list all the opened buffers and just remove the ones I want to close one by one. In my mind it makes sense something like that for removing scratch buffers, but I don't know how to achieve this. Has anyone been able to accomplish something like that?

[dpetka2001]

snacks uses vim.ui.select to list available Scratch buffers, but as far as I know it doesn't accept actions, like FzfLua or Telescope.

One solution would be to add a parameter to M.select(mode) and then check for example if it is "delete" to execute some additional logic to delete the file. But, in my personal opinion, that would soon escalate to other requests about additional actions and maybe that would be out of scope in the end.

Since you use FzfLua, you can take make your own custom picker by using the Scratch API to get the list of items. Something like the following should work I believe

function M.scratch_delete()
  local entries = {}  -- use this to populate the table with single string, because FzfLua expects items to be strings and not an object like `M.list` returns
  local items = Snacks.scratch.list()
  local item_map = {}  -- use this to store `item`, so we can later get access to `item.file`
  local utils = require("fzf-lua.utils")

  local function hl_validate(hl)
    return not utils.is_hl_cleared(hl) and hl or nil
  end

  local function ansi_from_hl(hl, s)
    return utils.ansi_from_hl(hl_validate(hl), s)
  end

  for _, item in ipairs(items) do
    item.icon = item.icon or Snacks.util.icon(item.ft, "filetype")
    item.branch = item.branch and ("branch:%s"):format(item.branch) or ""
    item.cwd = item.cwd and vim.fn.fnamemodify(item.cwd, ":p:~") or ""
    local display = string.format("%s %s %s %s", item.cwd, item.icon, item.name, item.branch)  -- same as what Snacks.scratch uses to display items
    table.insert(entries, display)
    item_map[display] = item
  end

  local fzf = require("fzf-lua")

  fzf.fzf_exec(entries, {
    prompt = "Scratch Buffers",
    fzf_opts = {
      ["--header"] = string.format(
        ":: <%s> to %s | <%s> to %s",
        ansi_from_hl("FzfLuaHeaderBind", "enter"),
        ansi_from_hl("FzfLuaHeaderText", "Select Scratch"),
        ansi_from_hl("FzfLuaHeaderBind", "ctrl-d"),
        ansi_from_hl("FzfLuaHeaderText", "Delete Scratch")
      ),
    },
    actions = {
      ["default"] = function(selected)
        local item = item_map[selected[1]]
        Snacks.scratch.open({ icon = item.icon, file = item.file, name = item.name, ft = item.ft })
      end,
      ["ctrl-d"] = function(selected)
        local item = item_map[selected[1]]
        os.remove(item.file)
        vim.notify("Deleted scratch file: " .. item.file)
      end,
    },
  })
end

And you can add additional actions according to your preferences. I believe the tools are there and each user should create his own custom picker to do what he wants. Bind it to a keymap and it should do what you want

vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>D", function()
  Util.fzf.scratch_delete()  -- this is just the path I use to store my custom pickers for fzf, change that to wherever you will store the above function
end, { desc = "Delete scratch file" })

[gonstoll]

Woww nice ✨ this works perfectly! Thank you so much @dpetka2001 🎉! Any idea how you can keep fzf's picker open after removing? Seems to perform the action and then close automatically. I tried something like

-- ...
  local actions = require('fzf-lua.actions')

-- ...
      ['ctrl-d'] = function(selected)
        local item = item_map[selected[1]]
        os.remove(item.file)
        vim.notify('Deleted scratch file: ' .. item.file)
        actions.resume()
      end,

Seems to stay in the picker, but the list still reflects a stale list.

[dpetka2001]

Just add M.scratch_buffers() instead of actions.resume() and wrap the whole function(selected) in curly brackets like {}, so the window won't flash. So

      ["ctrl-d"] = {
        function(selected)
          local item = item_map[selected[1]]
          os.remove(item.file)
          vim.notify("Deleted scratch file: " .. item.file)
          M.scratch_buffers()
        end,
      },

I changed the name of the function to M.scratch_buffers but you use whatever you've called it.

[gonstoll]

I feel the dumbest for not thinking about this 😄 this works perfect, thank you for the help!! ❤️