I’ve read the Wiki page about line flags but don’t see a way how to achieve something similar to Vim’s signcolumn=yes setting. It makes signcolumn always visible preventing it from showing and hiding too often which gets very distracting with automatic checking turned on. So if there’s no errors, it just stays empty without hiding.
I don’t believe that’s currently possible. Part of the problem is that Kakoune doesn’t just have a sign column, it allows arbitrary text, and I don’t know what happens if you have a flag that takes more than 80 columns in an 80 column window. Probably nothing good.
Also, if you have multiple flag-lines highlighters, they appear in different columns, even if they have flags on different rows, since each highlighter has a “default” face that appears on lines without a flag.
So it’s hard for Kakoune to know in advance exactly how many columns should be reserved for flags. I guess would make sense to have a reserved columns integer option, where Kakoune would leave the maximum of “reserved columns” and “required columns” blank at the left side of the terminal.
That’s sad. Since In GUI editors, we have fixed area to display marks, and by hovering them popup shows detailed info, because mark alone doesn’t really contain much information except color-coded mark type, e.g. error, warning, suggestion. I know that kakoune can display detailed flags, like in kakoune-palete, but I’d rather do this with more advanced popup info boxes, rather on a side panel, because as you’ve mentioned:
Maybe I should open an issue on GitHub then. Since shaking text is really annoying.
The vim signcolumn does not produce shaking text but it’s not very flexible either. It’s limited in width and plugins have to compete and overwrite each other signs.
Example of plugin competition: git (+/-), lint (error, warning) and marks.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/50sy1l/the_battle_for_the_sign_column/
You can use single column for all signs, even overridden ones, if info box can show multiple instances of each flag that are located in single cell. I believe that this isn’t really hard to support. Sign column also should display amount of flags in single cell.
I think if you need 30 columns to show flags, then you should go to different panel, split or window and be interactive.