TryBindKey not working as stated in Documentation

[tometaro07]

Hi! I installed micro a couple of weeks ago and I'm really enjoying the experience so far.

I was working around with an existing plugin and noticed that every time I tried to rebind a command, it auto generated a new one with the original key. I the end I always ended up with two keybinds for the command: my new one and the preset by the plugin.

I looked at the plugin code and it all looked right, so I started testing with the bindings.json file and noticed that the TryBindKey function, checks if the key is already used in a command, instead of checking if the command already as a key.

Maybe I'm the one miss reading the documentation just wanted to be sure.

Thank you in advance for the help!

[Andriamanitra]

I think this is how it's intended to work, but if the documentation confused you that could probably be reworded to be less confusing. Which documentation were you reading?

If you want to prevent TryBindKey from adding a key binding you can bind that key to None in ~/.config/micro/bindings.json. Personally I avoid using TryBindKey in my plugins because I find the behavior annoying and it's more convenient to manage keybindings for all of them centrally in bindings.json.

[tometaro07]

Thanks or the fast reply. I will remove the TryBindKey from the plugin its sounds to me like a better solution to me, it keeps the file tidier. But the None its a clever work around.

I was following this doc micro/runtime/help/plugis.md at line 172:

TryBindKey(k, v string, overwrite bool) (bool, error): bind the key k to the string v in the bindings.json file. If overwrite is true, this will overwrite any existing binding to key k. Returns true if the binding was made, and a possible error (for example writing to bindings.json can cause an error).

Maybe it could be rewritten to:

TryBindKey(k, v string, overwrite bool) (bool, error): bind the key k to the command v in the bindings.json file. If overwrite is true, this will overwrite any existing commands using the key k. If false, the keybind will be added if no other commands use the key k. Returns true if the binding was made, and a possible error (for example writing to bindings.json can cause an error).

This would be my suggestion to make the documentation clearer... but, once again, maybe it was just confusing for me.

Once again thank you for the help!

[dmaluka]

If overwrite is true, this will overwrite any existing commands using the key k. If false, the keybind will be added if no other commands use the key k.

This is gibberish, sorry.

A key can be bound to an action. There can only be one binding for an action at the same time, i.e. you cannot have both "Alt-r": "SaveAll" and "Alt-r": "FirstTab". An action, however, can be bound to more than one key, i.e. you can have both "Alt-r": "SaveAll" and "Ctrl-F5": "SaveAll". When TryBindKey("Alt-r", ...) is called, it overrides the action bound to Alt-r. It does not override the action bound to Ctrl-F5, because it is none of its business. It is perfectly fine to have two different keys bound to the same action (i.e. to be able to trigger the same action using different keys depending on where your fingers are at the moment), it is often useful.

So what exactly is not clear in the existing documentation?

...That being said, the behavior of TryBindKey() is indeed confusing and annoying (the behavior itself, not the way how it is documented). I was suggesting once to deprecate it in favor or a more sensible API: #3385 (comment)

[tometaro07]

What you are saying is true. Maybe what is confusing me is the TryBindKey() function itself. It is not intuitive, to me at least, why the function would create a new keybind to a command that the user already defined a keybind.

In the case that the user wants to have two different keybinds for the same action, the user can decide that themselves. There isn't a need for it to be forced by the TryBindKey() function.

#3385 (comment) this solution looks quite good actually

[dmaluka]

why the function would create a new keybind to a command that the user already defined a keybind.

Because the function doesn't know why did the user define this keybinding: to replace the plugin's default keybinding or to add a new keybinding while keep the default one enabled as well.

And if the user doesn't want to use the plugin's default key to trigger this action (and doesn't want to rebind this key to any other action either, i.e. doesn't want to use this key at all), usually the user doesn't even care if this key is even bound to this action or not (precisely because the user is not gonna use this key anyway), right?

And if the user for some reason still cares about that, the user can bind it to None, that's what None is for.

It's the same situation as with micro's own default keybindings, not just with plugin keybindings installed via TryBindKey().

[tometaro07]

Makes sense. Thank you for the clarification and for the help.

Keep the good work!