"ask" tool has sub optimal UX

[mrjones2014]

When the question is longer than just a very short question, the answer UX is suboptimal. I'm using the default Snacks picker.

Screenshot attached below. See how the question appears in a notification (I'm using nvim-notify); notifications dismiss on a timer, and you can't then go reference the question again without closing the picker, which cancels the question and terminates the prompt.

I'm not totally sure what the best solution is here. Maybe custom UI? Or maybe we could use nui.nvim components?

I'm willing to work on this myself and submit a PR, but I'd like some input from you on the direction you'd like to go for your plugin.

[aweis89]

Notably Snacks.notify does support a timeout option that can be set to 0 (also works when passing it through vim.notify) and then the notification can be manually dismissed. Guessing that's probably the most light-weight solution to this. Any custom UI will also need to account for differently configured pickers (including within snacks itself). For example a user might have it configured to be fullscreen

[mrjones2014]

I think we could build a pretty good ux for it with nui components.

[aweis89]

If we're adopting nui, I think it would probably be used more broadly then just this use-case similar to how Avente uses it to build their layouts. Adding it as dep just for this seems a bit heavy imho

[sudo-tee]

nui.nvim is indeed a little bit on the heavy side for this use case. If we pull it as a depdency we could use it for layout and for text rendering in the panel (as it supports Text/Line/Extmarks) But it's a huge refactor, that I don't have time to tackle.

I'm open to ideas on how to improve this.

Maybe you can inspire yourself on the way the permissions are handled directly in the chat window.

have a look at permission_window.lua

It creates a 'fake' SYSTEM message that it renders in the chat window and binds keymaps when displayed

In the chat window you have access to markdown rendering as well as ext_marks

It could look something like this (A prototype from chat GPT)

What do you think ?

[mrjones2014]

Oh yeah, I think that looks great! Really the only big issue currently is you can't see the full question text if I need to wait and think about my answer, so this solves that!

[sudo-tee]

Ok I will then start converting the question with the same pattern

[fredizzimo]

I was going to write an issue about this a few days ago, but then I just added this to the opencode config and forgot about it.

  "permission": {
    "question": "deny"
  }

Also it's not just the short title that is suboptimal. The fact that it's on top, and you can't read and scroll the whole chat log makes it impossible to have the full picture of what the question is about.

[sudo-tee]

I have something in the works that will be similar to the opencode TUI for this. It should be ready somewhere next week.

Opencode moves so fast that it's hard to keep up.

[sudo-tee]

@mrjones2014

I have a PR for a new question tool similar to the permission one,

If you have a minute to test and tell me if it works good for you I would appreciate it. This is a pretty significant change so I want to be sure it works fine.

[sudo-tee]

I will also update the permission window to the same pattern, it will simplify things up

[mrjones2014]

tested locally and it works great, thank you!