How to pretty print a lua table into an nvim buffer?

Question

Neovim provides a convenient pretty-printer:

:lua vim.print(vim.lsp.get_active_clients())

However, the active lsp clients output is massive so I'd want to see it in a buffer.

With vim-scriptease, I can use :Verbose to capture that output into a buffer:

:Verbose lua vim.print(vim.lsp.get_active_clients())

That pretty prints the table, captures the output, and creates a buffer with that output. Great to use / to navigate around the output.

But it seems that capturing lua should be easier in nvim since it's a core config language.

I figured out a command, but it seems verbose:

:lua vim.api.nvim_put(vim.split(vim.inspect(vim.lsp.get_active_clients()), "\n"), "", true, false)

I expected to find something like vim.api.nvim_as_buffer(vim.lsp.get_active_clients()), but maybe I'm just having trouble finding it in lua.txt?

Answer 1

You could use v:lua:

:new | put =v:lua.vim.inspect(v:lua.vim.lsp.get_active_clients())

(which apparently doesn't work in nvim 0.10 because attached_buffers contains integer indexes (E5100: table should contain either only integer keys or only string keys))

or luaeval():

:new | put =luaeval('vim.inspect(vim.lsp.get_active_clients())')