How do I get inverse search window focusing working on Wayland (sway)?

[DamianJLin]

Hello, I'm using vimtex with okular as my viewer on Wayland (in particular, swaywm). Inverse search works well except for that it does not focus on the Neovim window.

Does anyone have any idea how I can make this work, even if it's a bit hacky?

This is my failed attempt at a good-enough solution:

swaymsg '[title="Neovim"]' focus

will focus on an instance of Neovim, so I thought that by setting the Okular editor command as

nvim --headless -c "VimtexInverseSearch %l '%f'" && swaymsg '[title="Neovim"]' focus

would work.

However, this just breaks the Okular editor feature, and therefore inverse search. I also tried this with zathura, qpdfview and sioyek, to no avail.

[lervag]

Hello, I'm using vimtex with okular as my viewer on Wayland (in particular, swaywm). Inverse search works well except for that it does not focus on the Neovim window.

Great, glad to hear that. I'm still on X11 (I have a setup that has served me well for a decade or more, so why change a winning recipe?).

Does anyone have any idea how I can make this work, even if it's a bit hacky?

I'm sorry to say that I don't think I will be able to help much. I more or less don't know anything about Wayland and sway.

This is my failed attempt at a good-enough solution:

swaymsg '[title="Neovim"]' focus

will focus on an instance of Neovim

Did you try using only that in the Okular setting? Does that work?

Another thing you could try is to use nvim --headless -c "VimtexInverseSearch %l '%f'" and then use the VimtexEventViewReverse event. That is, you could add something like this to your neovim config:

vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd("User", {
  desc = "",
  pattern = "VimtexEventViewReverse",
  group = vim.api.nvim_create_augroup("init_vimtex", {}),
  callback = function()
    vim.system { "swaymsg", '[title="Neovim"]', "focus" }
  end,
})

I'm not 100 % sure which environment that runs in and whether swaymsg will be available. But it's worth a shot!

[lervag]

Can you update to the last version of VimTeX and try again? I think the cursor blinking is the reason of the delay. In the most recent version I removed the cursor blinking, as it is trivial to add it through user configuration if you like it.

[DamianJLin]

Did that and now it works perfectly! Thanks so much for your help!

Aside -- what is cursor blinking? I can't remember the cursor blinking before this.

[lervag]

Look at your video again, notice how the cursor blinks around time 0:07. The point was to make it easier to see where the cursor is after doing the inverse search. If you want to add it, you can do this:

vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd("User", {
  desc = "",
  pattern = "VimtexEventViewReverse",
  group = vim.api.nvim_create_augroup("init_vimtex", {}),
  callback = function()
    vim.system { "swaymsg", '[title="Neovim"]', "focus" }
    vim.fn["vimtex#ui#blink"]()
  end,
})

[lervag]

Oh, and I'm glad to hear it works now!

[DamianJLin]

Oh I see, blinking in inverse search, got it!