Is it possible to group buffers using mini.tabline/vim's inbuilt tabline

[InnocentZero]

Contributing guidelines

• I have read CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

Module(s)

mini.tabline

Question

I'm not entirely sure, but from the looks of it, it seems that mini.tabline hijacks the builtin tabline to display buffers.

I am a recent refugee from emacs land who used centaur-tabs while there. One feature of centaur tabs that I really love is that it only shows buffer tabs that are in the "buffer group" of the current buffer.

I know bufferline.nvim exists, and has its own support for tab groups, but I was wondering if there is any way I can use mini.tabline since I like how minimalistic it is.

1. Is there any way I can just have separate "buffer groups", say using neovim tabs so that one tab only shows one buffer group (or something along those lines)?
2. If 1 is not possible, is it possible for this to be a feature in mini.tabline?

Once again, thanks a lot for all your amazing plugins and contributions to the neovim community!

[loichyan]

If you meant buffers per tab, I recently discovered scope.nvim. I've been using it for a couple of days alongside mini.tabline, and haven't encountered any issues so far :)

[echasnovski]

1. Is there any way I can just have separate "buffer groups", say using neovim tabs so that one tab only shows one buffer group (or something along those lines)?

2. If 1 is not possible, is it possible for this to be a feature in mini.tabline?

I am afraid, the answer to both of these is "no, not with 'mini.nvim'". The reason is mostly based on fundamental design idea that Neovim treats buffers and tabpages as independent entities. From :h windows-intro:

Summary:
   A buffer is the in-memory text of a file.
   A window is a viewport on a buffer.
   A tab page is a collection of windows.

So there is a list of buffers that are "navigate-able" by the user (they are called "listed" buffers). Separately there are tabpages with each being a layout of windows each showing some buffers (not necessarily listed).

Although I do see an appeal in the "tabpage scoped buffers", there won't be such support for this in 'mini.tabline'. There might be a separate module for that in the future, but probably not until there is at least a remotely similar concept of "tabpage local buffers" in the Neovim.

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The 'tiagovla/scope.nvim' plugin suggested in this comment indeed looks like what you need.

Another approach might be to use a more native "local arguments". They can be shared by windows within same tabpage. In fact... this might be a good idea for a 'mini.arguments' module. I'll have to ponder on this.