Telescope buffer extract

What does this do?

This allows you to fuzzy-select a word or line from the current buffer using telescope and then either paste the selection at the current position, or copy the selection to your clipboard.

The inspiration for this plugin came from the tmux extrakto plugin. The reason I created this was for better ergonomics in the Neovim terminal for the use case of pasting terminal output back into the terminal input, or copying terminal output for use elsewhere.

Installation

I have no idea how modern-day Neovim plugin installation works. I still use pathogen with vendored plugins. Using pathogen, git clone into the bundle directory.

You must have telescope.nvim installed as well for this plugin to do anything.

How to use

This plugin automatically adds two new commands that open pickers. After the telescope picker closes, you will automatically go back to insert or terminal mode, depending on the active buffer. This is the default behaviour, but can be overridden.

:TelescopeBufferExtractWord
:TelescopeBufferExtractLine

Alternatively, with Lua:

:lua require'telescope-buffer-extract'.pick_word()
:lua require'telescope-buffer-extract'.pick_line()

If you do not want to enter insert/terminal mode after running the functions, do:

:lua require'telescope-buffer-extract'.pick_word({no_insert_mode = true})
:lua require'telescope-buffer-extract'.pick_line({no_insert_mode = true})

With the picker open, pressing Tab will paste the selection at the cursor's current location. Pressing Enter will copy the selection into the + register (usually the OS clipboard).

How I (jtroo) use it

I use the Neovim terminal only when I'm working in Windows, otherwise on Linux I'm using tmux. I have some keybindings to emulate tmux workflows inside the Neovim terminal. The ones calling this plugin in particular are:

" by word
tnoremap <c-b><tab> <c-\><c-n>:TelescopeBufferExtractWord<cr>
" by line
tnoremap <c-b>` <c-\><c-n>:TelescopeBufferExtractLine<cr>

These are terminal-mode mappings (like insert, but within a terminal) which will open the picker and then go back to terminal-mode once a selection is made.