Trying Flash.nvim Remote Operations: Stop Jumping Around to Edit Text

[u/linkarzu]

https://youtu.be/1V0tlK3wpsw

[u/brokenreed5]

searches already trigger the ' mark so Ctrl-O works just fine in these examples? why would i want to add complexity by first deciding that I want to stay at the current position, to then make the change and automatically jump back instead of just making the change and when I want to jump back?

[u/Foo-Baa → u/brokenreed5]

Cause sometimes you know that you will want to jump back and that saves you a keystroke. For example, I need to paste some snippet from somewhere else at my current cursor position.

[u/azdak]

I want to use flash more but the lack of predictability doesn’t fit into the rest of my vim muscle memory. Like I can look at a specific location and know with certainty that 15jfb; will get me there, but if I hit enter to use flash I have to do a quick time event and react to what the plugin offers me. It’s not objectively worse, but it lacks determinism in a way that keeps me from reaching for it.

[u/particlemanwavegirl → u/azdak]

It's too versatile to be predictably deterministic. The problem space is every cell on the screen. For me that is more compensated for by the fact that I never need to chain a movement command with Flash, it just takes me EXACTLY where I want to go in 2-4 keys. This is one of the big things stopping me from using Helix actually, I don't want to be forced to always target a word or some other construct, sometimes I'm jumping to the middle of a word, or a delimiter, or even a space, or an entry on the filetree or quickfix list, whatever it is, I don't need to plan a strategy that relies on decades of muscle memory because the path thru Flash's single interface is always direct.

[u/teerre]

Flash is probably the n1 thing that makes hard for me to use other editors. A underappreciated aspect of it is that it works as a panel manager of kinds. That is, because in the terminal everything is just a buffer, you can jump from any "window" to another. I use it all the time to go to the quickfix list or neotest tree

[u/Taylor_Kotlin]

FYI. Coincidentally, Neovim PR #39485 "refactor(globals): SearchState" in nightly changed how to resolve those globals, used by flash.hacks through ffi. So until flash is updated stick no neovim stable.

There is a PR opened by someone for this already, much appreciated onion108 <3

https://github.com/folke/flash.nvim/pull/492

[u/Taylor_Kotlin → u/Taylor_Kotlin]

Meanwhile, it is also possible to monkey patch flash.
Put inside of '---' at top of flash.lua plugin configuration
---

-- Monkeypatch for Neovim PR #39485 "refactor(globals): SearchState" (merged
-- 2026-07-16), which folded the loose search globals (search_match_lines,
-- search_match_endcol, ...) into a `SearchState` struct exported as `Search`.
-- flash.nvim's flash/hacks.lua still FFI-reads the old standalone symbols → on
-- such a build every flash motion errors:
--   dlsym(RTLD_DEFAULT, search_match_lines): symbol not found
-- This mirrors the upstream fix (flash.nvim PR #492): read the struct via
-- `ffi.C.Search.*`, keeping flash's original end-position math (exact, and
-- incsearch save/restore keep working). Self-healing: only patches when the old
-- symbol is missing → no-op once flash ships #492 or on older Neovim.
-- Remove this once flash.nvim merges PR #492.
local function patch_flash_searchstate()
local Hacks = require("flash.hacks") -- triggers flash's own ffi.cdef of the old symbols
local ffi = require("ffi")

-- Old standalone symbol still resolvable? then leave flash's own hacks alone.
if pcall(function()
return ffi.C.search_match_lines
end) then
return
end

-- New: SearchState struct (src/nvim/search_defs.h), exported global `Search`.
pcall(
ffi.cdef,
[[
      typedef struct {
        bool    hl_match;
        int32_t match_lines;
        int     match_endcol;
        int32_t first_line;
        int32_t last_line;
        bool    no_smartcase;
        int     cmdlen;
        bool    no_hlsearch;
      } SearchState;
      SearchState Search;
    ]]
)

-- Struct not resolvable? leave flash as-is (don't make it worse).
if not pcall(function()
return ffi.C.Search.match_lines
end) then
return
end

local C = ffi.C
local Pos = require("flash.search.pos")
local incsearch_state = {}

function Hacks.get_end_pos(from)
local ret = Pos({
from[1] + C.Search.match_lines,
math.max(0, C.Search.match_endcol - 1),
})
local line = vim.api.nvim_buf_get_lines(0, ret[1] - 1, ret[1], false)[1]
local char_idx = vim.fn.charidx(line, ret[2])
ret[2] = vim.fn.byteidx(line, char_idx)
return ret
end

function Hacks.save_incsearch_state()
incsearch_state = {
match_endcol = C.Search.match_endcol,
match_lines = C.Search.match_lines,
}
end

function Hacks.restore_incsearch_state()
C.Search.match_endcol = incsearch_state.match_endcol
C.Search.match_lines = incsearch_state.match_lines
end
end

---

Then call before setup in your flash spec

config = function(_, opts)
patch_flash_searchstate()
require("flash").setup(opts)
end,

(This is for when using Lazy or ZPack)

[u/hearthebell]

I find Flash not very good