Initial thoughts

The problem

When using lists and checkboxes in Markdown files as To Do lists whilst working on tasks, I’d like to have a way to easily check a checkbox once an item is complete or to uncheck it if needed.

Example

This is an example of a list of Markdown checkboxes:

- [x] A complete task
- [ ] An incomplete task

Existing approaches

This could be done by entering replace mode by typing r followed by the appropriate character to check or uncheck the checkbox. I'd prefer though to have a consistent way to check and uncheck a checkbox where I can reuse the same function and keymap.

There's an also an existing Vim plugin - jkramer/vim-checkbox - that I could use.

Solution

I’d like to create my own Neovim plugin for this written in Lua as I haven’t written one yet and it would be a good learning experience and an opportunity to start contributing to the Neovim ecosystem.

There are built-in Neovim APIs to get the current window, buffer, and cursor, and to get and set lines, so it should be possible to get the current line, check or uncheck a checkbox, and update the line’s contents.

Doing this would also be a good start point for other and more complicated plugins in the future.

Plugin structure

I’d like to follow the same structure as https://github.com/tjdevries/stackmap.nvim - a plugin that TJ and bashbunni wrote recently.

This includes writing tests with Plenary.

Checking, unchecking and toggling

I was originally thinking that there would be three public methods: check, uncheck, and toggle.

However I don't think that there's a need to expose methods for checking and unchecking.

if a checkbox is already checked or unchecked then you wouldn’t need to perform the same action again, so we just need the option to toggle a checkbox and expose a single public function.

For example:

-- lua/toggle-checkbox.lua

local M = {}

M.toggle = function()
  -- Toggle the checkbox.
end

return M

I could still create and use methods for checking and unchecking but keep them private by not adding them to the returned module.

Customisation

Customisation could be done by implementing require('toggle-checkbox').setup() if there is anything that would be worth configuring.

It would be up to the user to add a keymap to their own configuration rather than hard-coding one into the plugin.

Out of scope

Features such as customising and cycling through symbols would be out of scope initially in order to keep the code minimal, but could be added at a later date if there is a need for them.

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