How do I leave the scratch buffer open, when doing gf to the file?

[matu3ba]

Assume I want to quickly open some buffers for fast buffer navigation, for example with

fd filename | hx

Now I have those files in the [scratch] buffer

filename1
filename2
filename3

and <Space-b> shows

[scratch]

However, when I do gf on filename1 and try to reopen the scratch buffer via <Space-b>, then I do get

filename1

and the scratch buffer seems lost. Is this a bug or intended behavior? I would prefer to keep the scratch buffer always open, but the docs are unclear if and how I can rename the scratch buffer, so it is not automatically closed.

[the-mikedavis]

I believe we close the scratch buffer when choosing a file to open when the scratch buffer is unmodied / empty. You can open a new scratch buffer with :new or leave some modifications. It might be a bug that we're conflating the scratch buffer being unmodified and being empty

[matu3ba]

I believe we close the scratch buffer when choosing a file to open when the scratch buffer is unmodied / empty.

It is not empty, since I pipe the output into it with fd filename | hx. What was the use case/is the justification to close it, if it is unmodified but non-empty?
Ah, thanks alot. It is :new instead of :enew.

[the-mikedavis]

The idea with closing it automatically is that if it's empty and unmodified then it must not have been used and can be discarded. It sounds like there's a bug though where if the scratch buffer has contents from stdin, we're mistakenly discarding the scratch buffer because we think it's empty.

(I only have a mac handy at the moment which doesn't support piping in input so I can't confirm this is the case 😅)

[Omnikar]

As the author of the PR that added that feature, I'll say that that is almost certainly the case. I don't think piping into a scratch buffer from stdin was a feature when I implemented it, so there was no way for a scratch buffer to be unmodified without also being empty, so I just used the unmodified status to know whether the buffer is empty.

[the-mikedavis]

I made an issue: #3305