vim-smoothie: Smooth scrolling for Vim done right 🥤

This (neo)vim plugin makes scrolling nice and smooth. Find yourself completely lost every time you press Ctrl-D or Ctrl-F? You might want to give vim-smoothie a try!

Installation

You will need reasonably new Vim or Neovim with timers support. Vim 8+ or Neovim 0.3+ should do the trick.

Install the plugin using your favorite plugin manager, for example vim-plug:

Plug 'psliwka/vim-smoothie'

Customization

vim-smoothie aims for sane defaults, and should work out-of-the-box for most users. In some cases, however, you might want to customize its behavior, by adjusting one or more of the following variables in your vimrc:

• g:smoothie_no_default_mappings: If true, will prevent the plugin from overriding default scrolling keys (Ctrl-D and friends). You are then supposed to bind keys you like by yourself. See plugin/smoothie.vim to discover available mappings.

• g:smoothie_disabled: Disable vim-smoothie. Useful for extremely slow connections.

• g:smoothie_base_speed: Controls the speed. Set to 10 by default. To go slower, reduce the value. To go faster, increase the value.

• g:smoothie_update_interval: Time interval (in milliseconds) between successive screen updates. Use a smaller value to get smoother animations, or use a bigger value if you are on a slow connection.

• g:smoothie_break_on_reverse: If true, then scrolling will stop immediately when a command is given to scroll opposite to the current direction.

• g:smoothie_bell_enabled: If true, then a bell will be rang if the scroll commmand being issued is invalid (i.e. we have reached boundary)

Alternatives, a.k.a. why create yet another plugin

There are many other Vim plugins attempting to resolve the same problem. The most intresting one is sexy_scroller.vim, which covers way more movement commands than vim-smoothie will ever do. Unfortunately, it also suffers from frequent visual artifacts, such as erratic screen jumps and animation jittering, impairing visual orientation and breaking the user experience. Many of these bugs are nearly impossible to fix due to the plugin's internal design. Hence, vim-smoothie was born, focusing on stable, bug-free, smooth experience, at a cost of smaller feature set.

The table below summarizes key differences between vim-smoothie and three other popular smooth scrolling plugins I've used in the past: sexy_scroller.vim, comfortable-motion.vim, and vim-smooth-scroll.

	vim-smoothie	sexy_scroller.vim	comfortable-motion.vim	vim-smooth-scroll
Supported commands	^D ^U ^F ^B	A lot❤️	^D ^U ^F ^B	^D ^U ^F ^B
Erratic screen jumps and jittering now and then	Nope	A lot💔	Nope	Nope
Scrolling distance is proportional to window height	✅	✅	❌	✅
Easing out (soft-stop)	✅	✅	✅	❌
Supports setting [count] before movement (f.ex. 3^F to scroll down 3 pages)	✅	✅	❌	❌
Respects scroll and startofline options	✅	✅	❌	❌
^D and ^U behave correctly near buffer ends, just moving the cursor instead of scrolling the window	✅	✅	❌	❌
Pun in name	✅	✅	❌	❌

Known issues/incompatibilities

vim-smoothie strives to remain fully compatible with native commands it replaces. That is, every command should still behave exactly as described in :help scroll.txt. There are still some deviations from the origial behavior, which hopefully will be addressed in the future:

• ^D, ^U, ^F, ^B should beep when they can't move any further.
• ^F and ^B should respect the window option.
• Native commands may move in a smarter way over wrapped/folded lines.

Credits

Created by Piotr Śliwka.

Many thanks to authors of vim-smooth-scroll, comfortable-motion.vim, and sexy_scroller.vim for inspiration!

License

MIT