trjhtr

When you jump to a search result in Vim, your cursor can end up near the bottom (or top) of the window, making it difficult to see the surrounding context.

Some people like to automatically center the cursor after such a jump, but I find that to be too drastic, since it means even small jumps cause scrolling.

There's also a 'scrolloff' option you can set, which keeps the cursor some fixed number of lines away from the top/bottom of the window at all times, except when near the start or end of the file.

I like to keep 'scrolloff' set to a low value most of the time. It's only after certain navigation jumps that I want to apply a larger offset. So I wrote a vimscript function that applies a given offset.

The first implimentation increased 'scrolloff', redrew the screen, then returned 'scrolloff' to its original value, but this caused an annoying flicker each time the screen was redrawn.

I've reimplemented it to calculate and apply the necessary scroll operations. The interesting part was tuning the calculations so that edge-cases were considered.

The desired offset decreases gradually as you approach the start / end of the file. The offset is also scaled down as necessary if the window is too small to accomodate the given value.

func! Nudge(o) abort
 let offset = min([a:o, winheight(0)/2])

 let bot_want = min([offset, line('$') - line('.')])
 let bot_have = winheight(0) - winline()
 if bot_want > bot_have
 call s:nudge_bot(bot_want - bot_have)
 else
 let top_want = min([offset, line('.') - 1])
 let top_have = winline() - 1
 if top_want > top_have
 call s:nudge_top(top_want - top_have)
 endif
 endif
endf

func! s:nudge_bot(count)
 exec 'normal!' a:count . "<C-E>"
endf

func! s:nudge_top(count)
 exec 'normal!' a:count . "<C-Y>"
endf

Vimscript is never pretty, but it was fun to work through this one.