help: Can't get the paragraph.min_width config option to work.

[XavierLaRochelle]

Neovim version (nvim -v)

0.11.0

Neovim distribution

N/A

Description

I want paragraphs to be rendered in the french style, which means that they have a left margin on the first line only. Something that looks like that :

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent fringilla quam nec 
lectus commodo, ac semper ante semper. Curabitur et consectetur elit, id facilisis magna. 
Donec interdum, risus id aliquet hendrerit, sem ante dictum ex, volutpat imperdiet purus
orci sed metus. Duis sit amet lorem urna.

I was able to achieve it with the following config options :

paragraph = {
  enabled = true,
  left_margin = 4,
  min_width = 80
}

This works fine but the indentation is annoying for small lines. It was my understanding that the this was purpose of the min_width options, i.e. disable paragraph-rendering (aka. adding indentation) if the paragraph is under min_width characters long. I've been testing it for about an hour and no matter what I do, changing min_width has no effect on rendering. I tried disabling potentially conflicting plugins like obsidian.nvim but it still doesn't do anything. Am I not understanding this config option properly?

[MeanderingProgrammer]

The documentation on min_width could definitely be improved. Currently:

-- Minimum width to use for paragraphs.

The purpose of min_width is only for percentage based left_margin values. The doc for left_margin is:

-- Amount of margin to add to the left of paragraphs.
-- If a float < 1 is provided it is treated as a percentage of available window space.        

So if you set a value of 0.5 it'll add a left margin of 50% of the available space.

The way this is calculated is by taking the window width, subtracting the width of the longest line in the paragraph, and multiplying by 0.5. For example:

• Window width = 120
• Longest paragraph width = 40
• Left margin added = (120 - 40) * 0.5 = 40

If you specified a min_width value of 80 for example, this would change and instead of treating the width of the paragraph as 40 it'll be treated as 80. So the calculation changes to:

• Window width = 120
• max(Longest paragraph width, min_width) = 80
• Left margin added = (120 - 80) * 0.5 = 20

There's currently no way to specify the rows that should have a margin added within a paragraph, it's an all rows or none functionality, nor is there a way to apply the functionality to only some paragraphs and not others. I'm actually not sure which functionality you want.

I wouldn't expect your example paragraph to work how you would like. Unless the paragraph is a single line and relies on neovim line wrapping, then only the first line will have the margin added since the paragraph as a whole is only one line. If you add line breaks directly into the markdown all of the lines will have the margin.

If all you need is a way to disable the margin I can add a function to do that. Probably by allowing left_margin to be a function that takes the paragraph text as input. From there you could either return 4 or 0 depending on the text length.

[MeanderingProgrammer]

I've added the ability to set left_margin to a function here: dfc1299

After updating if you want to use a left_margin of 4 only if the paragraph is longer than 80 characters you would do:

require('render-markdown').setup({
    paragraph = {
        left_margin = function(ctx)
            return #ctx.text > 80 and 4 or 0
        end,
    },
})

[XavierLaRochelle]

Yes sorry for taking some time to respond but your solution does solve my problem. I also wasn't clear in my initial question. My example was indeed one line and relies on neovim's line wrapping feature. Should've mentioned it. Anyway, thanks for the help!