pulsar-hover

Contextual hints for Pulsar.

Designed as a replacement for both atom-ide-datatip and atom-ide-signature-help.

Services

Hover information and datatips

This package can show most datatips from packages that consume Atom IDE’s datatip service, but it purposefully drops support for some of that service’s arcane features. You probably won’t miss them. All the stuff provided by most IDE packages is supported.

Because the datatip service is a bit bloated and (strangely) inverts the consumer/provider relationship, this package prefers a new service called hover. When searching for a provider for a particular editor pane, hover providers will be given priority over datatip consumers.

(The hover service may not yet have any providers at time of release, but some will emerge after the provider implementation is added to @savetheclocktower/atom-languageclient).

Signature help

This package also provides the Atom IDE signature-help service so it can offer contextual “signature help” while you’re typing the arguments of a function call. This takes the form of an “overlay” editor decoration above your cursor.

In order to do this job for a given language, it needs a consumer of signature-help that operates on files of that type.

By default, this signature help will appear automatically when appropriate while you type, but you can configure it to appear only after the invocation of a command instead.

Again, because signature-help inverts the consumer/provider relationship, this package prefers a new service called signature. When searching for a signature help provider for a particular editor pane, signature providers will be given priority over signature-help consumers.

Commands

Configuration

pulsar-hover.hover.showOnCursorMove

Whether to show the overlay automatically when the cursor moves to a new location. Defaults to false, meaning you must invoke the pulsar-hover:toggle command to show/hide the overlay at the cursor position.

pulsar-hover.hover.showOnMouseMove

Whether to show the overlay automatically when the mouse pointer moves to a new location within the active editor. Defaults to true. When disabled, mouse activity will not trigger the showing of hover overlays.

pulsar-hover.hover.hoverTime

How long (in milliseconds) to wait before asking for hover information on mouse or cursor rest; also how long for the hover overlay to linger on screen after mouse or cursor movement. Defaults to 250.

pulsar-hover.signatureHelp.showOverlayWhileTyping

Whether to show the signature help overlay automatically while the user types function parameters. When enabled, the appropriate overlay should show for each of the parameters of a given function and should close once you’re done typing the function. When disabled, you must invoke the pulsar-hover:toggle-signature-help command to show/hide the overlay when appropriate.

Customization

The overlays rely heavily on your UI theme’s default styles for panels. But everything about the overlays’ appearance can be customized by editing your user stylesheet.

Here’s a simplified version of the HTML for the overlay in the screenshot:

<atom-panel class="hover-overlay-view-container">
  <div class="inset-panel padded hover-overlay-view">
    <pre><code>type WritableStringCSSProperties = {}</code></pre>
    <p>All the writable string properties in <code>CSSStyleDeclaration</code>.</p>
  </div>
</atom-panel>