Reverse the order of key-labels for avy-goto-*-above

[MicahElliott]

Let's say I have a window showing many (200) lines. Point is somewhere in the middle or bottom of the screen. I want to jump up say 5 lines. Avy presently is optimized to jump most easily way up to the top of the window rather than 5 lines up. To go upward, I almost always end up typing two prompt chars.

If for the "above" case, the order was reversed, going up 5 lines would always just require typing a single char to jump. I feel that this should be the default behavior for the "above" commands. Isn't it most common to do shorter jumps?

I suppose a workaround is to just rewrite the little avy-goto-word-1-above and have the jumpable range limited to ~30 lines up from point rather than (window-start). I just didn't see an obvious way to to reverse the labeling.

I also see that if I nreverse the lst in avy-tree fn that it works as I like (for above). So I'm not sure if it's better to write my own hacked up version of avy-tree, or figure out if I should learn to write an order-fn for avy-orders-alist, and if that's what it's designed for. But I don't see a way inside of avy-tree to determine if the caller was an "above" or "below" fn.

Thanks for any tips (and for the amazing tool).

[MicahElliott]

I think this works:

(defun avy-tree (lst keys)
  "Coerce LST into a balanced tree.
The degree of the tree is the length of KEYS.
KEYS are placed appropriately on internal nodes."
  (let* ((len (length keys))
         (order-fn (cdr (assq avy-command avy-orders-alist)))
         (lst (if order-fn
                  (cl-sort lst #'< :key order-fn)
                (if (string-match-p "above" (symbol-name this-command)) ; *** THIS IS THE CHECK ***
		    (nreverse lst)
		  lst))))
...

Does this seem ok? If so, shall I put in a PR with this change?

[sivaplaysmC]

@MicahElliott your modfification of avy-tree is interesting , but actually avy-goto-line-above
takes a second arguement , reverse .
if reverse is non nil , the behaviour you request will be available
please close this issue if my suggestion fixes your problem