How to display popup window on the left or right side

Question

I looked into the :h popup.txt and unless i missed something, did not see any mention for setting a popup window on the left or right side.

PS: I'm on Vim 8.2 (latest compiled as of now)

Any example on how to do this?

Answer 1

A popup window in Vim is a "floating" window, so it actually covers the current windows and the text in them.

You can set the line, column and adjust min/max width and height to have a popup cover the left or the right half of the screen.

For example, for a popup covering the left half of the screen:

let winid = popup_create('popup', {
    \ 'line': 1,
    \ 'col': 1,
    \ 'minwidth': &columns / 2,
    \ 'minheight': &lines - 1})

And one covering the right half:

let winid = popup_create('popup', {
    \ 'line': 1,
    \ 'col': &columns,
    \ 'minwidth': &columns / 2,
    \ 'minheight': &lines - 1,
    \ 'pos': 'topright'})

See :help popup_create-arguments for details on the arguments you can pass when creating a popup window.