mini.align question

[albertfgu]

I recently migrated from vim-easy-align to mini.align; thanks for the amazing plugins! It's working out of the box for my use case, except for one minor detail that's confusing me. When I align a table on &, all the columns are shrunk to the smallest possible width, except the first column is much larger than expected. See screenshot:

I apologize if this question has been answered in other documentation

[echasnovski]

Columns are not shrunk, but the opposite - they are padded (from left and/or right). Try using trim step with custom merge character.

That is:

• Visually select region to be aligned.
• Press gA to initiate interactive align.
• Press & to align by it.
• Press t to trim whitespace.
• Press m followed by <Space> and <CR> (Enter).

[albertfgu]

Thanks for the fast response. This seems to add one extra whitespace to that first column which is fine. Next question is: is there a way to create "recipes" by binding all of that to one key after ga (e.g. override the behavior of ga&)?

[echasnovski]

Thanks for the fast response. This seems to add one extra whitespace to that first column which is fine. Next question is: is there a way to create "recipes" by binding all of that to one key after ga (e.g. override the behavior of ga&)?

Yes, there is. Through writing own modifier. That is, adding a function to config.modifiers following this help entry. My previous suggestion translates like so:

require('mini.align').setup({
  modifiers = {
    ['&'] = function(steps, opts)
      opts.split_pattern = '&'
      table.insert(steps.pre_justify, MiniAlign.gen_step.trim())
      opts.merge_delimiter = ' '
    end
  }
})