Opening fern in a float

[bryanforbes]

Several plugins are adding the ability to open them in a float (nvim) or popup (vim). For instance, coc-explorer, fzf, and defx all have this ability. It would be really nice to have this behavior in fern.

[lambdalisue]

I don't think it's useful enough to introduce extra complexities while Vim and Neovim uses different strategy to produce float window. Do you have any real usage example which would drastically make it useful?

[poetaman]

@lambdalisue I was about to file an enhancement request for this. Here's the use-case: using fern -drawer I wanted to open a drawer that doesn't resize the existing splits, but appears as an overlay on the left side of screen. Then one could combine it with vim-startify page (there is a option to specify padding on the left in vim-startify) to create a more traditional looking "project page". Rest of the functionality need not be floating, just a drawer to the left (such that when it opens it doesn't push contents of startify page to left). I think not having other text move away from its position leads to a less distracting UI when one uses smart keybindings to knit the functionality of a wonderful file browser like Fern (its way faster than NERDtree with devicons, etc), and a wonderful project launch page like vim-startify.

[lambdalisue]

Well, float window in Vim and Neovim is quite different and I'm not going to put Vim only or Neovim only feature thus I still don't think what you explained is enough to introduce such extra complexities...

[zfogg]

+1

[brandon1024]

I tend to agree with @lambdalisue, this would add a fair bit of complexity and I don't see much benefit. Adding new features for the sake of adding new features isn't the right mindset we should have. And since popups aren't well supported in Neovim, a good chunk of users wouldn't get such a feature anyway.