Sleep does not work in custom vimscript functions

[takkiraz]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to implement a custom function in IdeaVim that opens the commit window and automatically triggers GitHub Copilot to generate a commit message. However, I'm running into an issue where the sleep command doesn't seem to work properly in my custom function.

nmap <leader>gco :call CheckinProjectAndCopilotCommit()<CR>

" Combined Git commit and Copilot suggest
function! CheckinProjectAndCopilotCommit()
    execute 'action CheckinProject'
    sleep 1000m
    execute 'action copilot.git.commit.button'
endfunction

When I execute this function, I consistently get the error message:

Commit field has not been initialized correctly

It seems like the second action (copilot.git.commit.button) is being called before the commit window is fully loaded, even though I've added a sleep 1000m delay. The sleep command appears to have no effect in the custom function.

When I manually execute the actions step by step with a pause between them, everything works as expected:

:action CheckinProject
(wait for window to load)
:action copilot.git.commit.button

Does IdeaVim support sleep in custom functions?
Is there a better way to wait for the commit window to initialize before executing the next action?
Are there any alternative approaches to achieve this workflow?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[citizenmatt]

Unfortunately, I don't have a good answer for you. Most IDE actions are asynchronous to some degree, such as opening and updating the UI, or reformatting code, or launching a dialog to refactor, etc. which means it's very hard to know when an action is "done". This means we can't easily chain multiple actions together, and it means that the :action command isn't really designed for scripting or orchestration, and is more of a convenience for invoking a single action, usually in response to a mapping (using the newer, and indeed better map foo <Action>(…) syntax).

IdeaVim doesn't implement the :sleep command, and for various reasons, I'm not sure it would do much good if it did, either.

I wonder if Macros would help? You can record a set of actions, save them with a name and then invoke this macro with an action, e.g. :action Macro.{Foo}. Perhaps you can record a macro that would invoke both actions? I think the UI thread is updated while the actions are being replayed, so the tool window should appear. You can edit the macro after it's saved to delete unnecessary steps or keystrokes. Maybe this would be enough for an IdeaVim mapping - IdeaVim invokes the macro, which can run multiple actions.

(*) If you're interested, I think it would be very hard to implement :sleep in a useful manner. Vimscript is single threaded, and Vim's own implementation of :sleep is to block the UI until the time has elapsed, although the docs do state that queued messages and timers are still processed. IdeaVim's Vimscript support is also single threaded, and runs on the main thread. If we block the UI for the given time, then we'd get a UI freeze, and the tool window wouldn't get the chance to open. If we tried to suspend the Vimscript, I think we're asking for a lot of trouble and complexity. We'd need to handle state change - the user moving focus, moving the text caret, opening or closing editors, etc. We'd also have to handle re-entrancy, and figure out what happens when the user continues typing, while the execution of the previous keystroke is still suspended, and what happens if those new keystrokes invoke a Vimscript expression 😅

Another interesting idea might be possible if we had support for autocmd. Perhaps we could add an event for when tool windows are shown/hidden, and then you could invoke a new function when the tool window action had actually opened the tool window. (Hmm. We're not guaranteed to have a current editor in this case, so there could also be problems with this)