What is the best way to get two or more text inputs in a window?

[rootschafer]

I've been pretty disappointed with the neovim tools for multi-file search and replace. Spectre.nvim is decent, but the UI could be improved. So tonight I decided to try to try build my own find-and-replace tool/ui that functions similarly to Spectre.nvim, but uses snacks for the UI. I think it could be a really useful tool for a lot of people. I dove into the snacks code and was able to get a window with two text inputs displaying, although the second text input doesn't work yet.

My fork (https://github.com/rootschafer/snacks.nvim) is messy, but you should be able to test it out without breaking your existing snacks stuff. All the dual_picker logic is, for now, inside a new directory lua/snacks/dual_picker (started as a copy of the lua/snacks/picker dir). You can try out the window from the screenshot below by calling Snacks.dual_picker.far().

I'd love to know if snacks.nvim has support for more than one text input boxes in some way that I missed, if not, is this something snacks would like to support in the future? What do you think that looks like ideally? Would it be a new picker that's separate from the existing one or could the functionality be built into the exiting picker without breaking changes?

Would a find and replace tool that feels similar to Snacks.picker.grep be something you'd want to use?

[drowning-cat]

No, multiple inputs aren't supported.

In your case, I would simply use the quickfix list:

1. Open the grep picker and perform your search.
2. Press <C-a> to select all results.
3. Press <C-q> to send all selected items to the quickfix list.
4. Perform search and replace:
   • either use :cdo to replace all occurrences
   • or use quicker.nvim to save changes with :w.

[rootschafer]

Yeah I'm aware of all that except the quicker.nvim :w which is nice, thank you. Also, using the substitute command is better than Spectre.nvim because undo history is respected.

When I started typing this reply I was going to say the "quickfix-substitute" method still doesn't allow you to select many search include and exclude paths, but I found a great work around that I like better than the typical "Paths to Include" and "Paths to Exclude" text boxes. It might be helpful to others so here's how to use it and set it up:

This is a simple picker action to open a grep picker from the explorer with the search directories set to the currently selected files and dirs. To use it: in the explorer, select the files or directories you want to include in the search, then use the keybinding (<leader>/ in this case) to open a grep picker for those selected files and dirs. If nothing is selected, it searches through the item under the cursor so this action can replace the "picker_grep" action.

To set it up, add the picker_grep_select action below to your snacks.nvim opts and configure a keybind for it in the explorer opts:

  {
      picker = {
        sources = {
          explorer = {
            win = {
              list = {
                keys = {
                  ["<leader>/"] = "picker_grep_select",
                },
              },
            },
          },
        },
        actions = {
          ---@param picker snacks.Picker
          picker_grep_select = function(picker)
            local node = picker:selected({ fallback = true })
            local dirs_list = {}
            for _, item in pairs(node) do
              local dir = item.file
              table.insert(dirs_list, dir)
            end

            Snacks.picker.grep({ dirs = dirs_list })
          end,
        },
      },
   }

Thanks for your help, I'm very happy with this set up.