Kakoune Recent Buffers

Motivation

Very often I'm working with 3 to 4 files that I want to cycle trough but using the jumplist its often too complex, as it sometimes will take me back and forth when I just want to go back, otoh, I love the idea of marks but I really use them for anchoring extremely central files|buffers, these other pivotal buffers are not "important" enough to deserve a mark at least to me, but I want to navigate around them withtou much fuzz, thus, I decided to make this plugin which helps me move as I want and also lets me pick between the last 4 buffers I visited very easily, I hope other people would find it useful.

Use

when firing recent-buffers-pick-link, the keys j, k, l and <semicolon> will respectively take you to the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th lats visited buffer. recent-buffers-loose-chain will go to the previous visited buffer and recent-buffers-pull-chain will get you to the first buffer you visited, both commands keep the ring like shape of the buffer list, allowing you to navigate between them seamlessly.

It will omit buffers with earbuds, works correctly with files that include spaces and removes entries when buffers are closed.

It also supports freezing the current buffer chain, think of it like vim's harpoon, only that the files you are interested in are the ones you recently where in, when you freeze it, you can navigate in that chain without it updating like in the "normal" mode, you can access this frozen chain with recent-buffers-freezed-pick-link, both the normal and the frozen promt now tell you that pressing f will freeze the current chain.

Suggested mappings

plug "eko234/kakoune-recent-buffers" config %{
  declare-user-mode chain
  map global user l ": recent-buffers-pick-link<ret>" -docstring "recent buffers"
  map global user L ": enter-user-mode -lock chain<ret>" -docstring "chain mode"
  map global chain p ": recent-buffers-loose-chain<ret>" -docstring "loose"
  map global chain n ": recent-buffers-pull-chain<ret>" -docstring "pull"
}