How to change the grep match highlight colors of the preview window?

[morenoblue]

I have been trying to figure out which highlight group is associated with the match on the preview window during the grep search but I can't seem to figure this one out. As I was debugging this to narrow down which group it was, I realized that the specific group doesn't even get returned by the command 'highlight' (If it did, then the color should have changed to a red background with a blue foreground which wasn't the case as we can see in the video).

What am I missing?

output4.mp4

[ibhagwan]

Your video wasn't uploaded so it's hard for me to tell what you're talking about.

In general preview highlights for grep (if not "native") are controlled by FzfLuaSearch, which you can either link to something else or test in a one time call :FzfLua live_grep hls.search=CurSearch

[morenoblue]

Hi, thanks for the fast reply!

I don't know whats going on because I can see the video just fine. I tried viewing it from different devices such as my phone (which is not login to my github account) and its showing the video with no prob.

But what I did in the video was essentially this:

1. I opened an empty buffer and typed :put =execute('highlight')<CR>
This pasted in the buffer all of the currently used highlight groups, including the FzfLua ones.

2. Using vim magic I created a macro to grab all of the highlight group names and add them in my init.lua as such: vim.cmd([[hi! <name_of_the_highlight> guifg=blue guibg=#ff0000]])
This would change every single highlight group to use a blue foreground and a red background which would essentially destroy all of my beautiful colors that I had set with great care and passion in my config, but the goal was to check whether It was possible to change the color that I was targeting and this seemed like a good strategy.

3. I restarted my Neovim instance and ran :lua require("fzf-lua").live_grep()<CR>
Here as soon as I restarted Neovim we could clearly see that everything was indeed set to a red background and a blue foreground, Even most of the colors of FzfLua highlights with the exception being the background of currently selected line in the preview window (which is exactly what I was trying to change lol).

I don't know why you couldn't view the video but I will try to put a picture now, hopefully it will display:

NOTE: The color that I wanted to change is that line's dark background in the preview window. I played around in this website¹ to figure out whether that was an option in the fzf tool itself but I didn't find anything that suggests that that's the case.

1. https://vitormv.github.io/fzf-themes/

[morenoblue]

Hello again, I tried researching a little bit more rn and figured it out.

As it turns out, that is indeed a color coming directly from fzf (shouldn't have used an unofficial website to check that, my bad) which apparently can't be changed with the vim highlight groups. As explained in this issue, fzf actually sets that through the bat theme, so after I run something like :let $BAT_THEME='gruvbox-light'<CR> the colors change:

My fault for rushing to open this discussion, should've researched a bit more. Thanks thought :)

[ibhagwan]

If you use the built in previewer you can control that highlight with FzfLuaCursorLine.

[morenoblue]

Ohhh I okay, I think I got it.

So I added the winopts option to my config like I show below and its now working like you described; I can now control the background of the cursor line in the preview window using the FzfLuaCursorLine highlight group. Thank you very much.

{
"ibhagwan/fzf-lua",
dependencies = { "nvim-tree/nvim-web-devicons" },
config = function()
	require("fzf-lua").setup({
		"max-perf",
		"telescope",
		winopts = { preview = { default = "builtin" } },

		keymap = {
			fzf = {
				["ctrl-q"] = "select-all+accept",
			},
		},
	})

	vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>ew", require("fzf-lua").files, { desc = "Fzf Files" })
	vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>ef", require("fzf-lua").lsp_document_symbols, { desc = "Fzf symbols" })
	vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>eg", require("fzf-lua").live_grep, { desc = "Fzf live_grep" })
	vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>eh", require("fzf-lua").helptags, { desc = "Fzf help tags" })
	vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>ej", require("fzf-lua").jumps, { desc = "[telescope] show jumplist" })
	vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>ee", function()
		require("fzf-lua").files({ cwd = vim.fn.stdpath("config") })
	end, { desc = "Fzf find config files" })
end
}