Adding background using RangeHighlighter

[synopss]

Background can be added with RangeLineHighlighter.

I made some tests to add a background color while still having errors written in Inlays. It was working fine but the implementation was a bit hacky. I'll try to find a better solution before going for a PR.

Edit : after some research, I found EditorLinePainter. The idea is to replace Inlays by that while using RangeLineHighlighter for the background.

[chylex]

I cannot find any references to RangeLineHighlighter in the SDK.

[synopss]

I made a typo mistake, it's called RangeHighlighter You can use MarkupModel.addLineHighlighter()

[chylex]

I'm not familiar with these APIs, are there any caveats with replacing inlays with EditorLinePainter?

[synopss]

I can't tell you for sure, I am a bit like you digging into intellij APIs trying to understand the best way to do things. All I know, is this is used by the debugger, and I also saw it used in GitToolBox plugin.

I guess inlays can also be usefull since they can isolate quite efficiently errors on the same line.

One thing for sure, you can add a background color by using MarkupModel.addLineHighlighter(). Like a said, I tried something which is working well, but the implementation is a bit hacky since you have to link it with each Inlays. When i'll be back home I'll create a PR with everything in it. You are free to merge it, or take inspiration from what was done and improve it.

But in the end, I believe there are only 2 options (I know about) :

• Using a mix of Inlay and RangeHighlighter. The first one for the text, the second for the background.
• Using EditorLinePainter which will manage both background font color, etc.

[chylex]

I can profile and test it. A PR is appreciated, it will just take potentially a lot of time before it can be released; besides performance and making sure it looks good in various UI themes, I have to consider that some people will want to turn this feature off.

The plugin currently has no configuration. I made it specifically to suit my needs with zero configuration, because I find IntelliJ's configuration to be PITA on both the plugin development and user side. From my experiments with adding configuration for #2, looks like it's still a PITA, but both this and #2 are good reasons to make the plugin configurable, so I will figure something out.

[chylex]

If your PR changes inlays to EditorLinePainter, can you split it into two PRs - one for EditorLinePainter and one for the background color?

[synopss]

My work doesn't use EditorLinePainter. I didn't try to implement it, since I didn't want to change to many things on your work.

[chylex]

The current state looks like this (with some customized inspection severity settings to show all the colors).

I like it. It solves the issue I observed where people don't see their inspections likely because they aren't prominent enough. I think it's draws attention but isn't so intrusive that I'd need to add configuration to disable it, but will see.

[synopss]

Yeah, I like it too, nice work.

[chylex]

Having issues with ghost highlights that stay after the inspection disappears or moves, don't know how to reliably reproduce it but it's a release blocker until I figure it out.

[synopss]

I remember using a map to link a highlight to an inlay to fix that issue, Since you changed a lot of the code since my poc, maybe you removed that, I am not 100% sure.

[chylex]

There's a map of original highlighters to both inlays and line highlighters. It works for inlays all the time, but for line highlighters it seems to randomly break.

[chylex]

addLineHighlighter doesn't actually work for this, it attaches the highlight to the beginning of the line instead of the area affected by the inspection, and some actions (like auto-import) make them drift apart. It looks like addRangeHighlighter with HighlighterTargetArea.LINES_IN_RANGE might work.