fix: replace each loading notification by its own handle

[wmaurer]

Problem

In a pnpm workspace, one 󰇚 Fetching … notification stays on the screen after both jobs have finished. Nothing in the plugin can replace or hide it anymore, so the user has to clear it by hand (for example :lua Snacks.notifier.hide()).

Which of the two messages gets stuck depends on which job finishes first, so it can be either Fetching latest versions or Fetching pnpm workspace.

There is a second problem with the same cause: while both jobs are running, the spinner draws both notifications with the message of only one instance, so the second one shows the wrong text.

How to reproduce

1. Open a package.json in a pnpm workspace (a pnpm-workspace.yaml above it), with yq on $PATH and a notification plugin installed (snacks.notifier or nvim-notify).
2. Watch the notifications while the plugin loads.
3. One 󰇚 Fetching … notification is replaced by the result message. The other one stays on the screen.

actions/show.lua starts two jobs in a workspace — outdated --json and the workspace file — and each job creates its own loading instance. That is why the workspace case shows the problem, but any two instances that run at the same time will do it.

Cause

ui/generic/loading-status.lua keeps a queue of instances, but it stores only one notification handle, in M.state.notification. start() overwrites it:

M.start = function(id)
    for _, instance in ipairs(M.queue) do
        if instance.id == id then
            instance.is_ready = true
            M.state.notification = instance.notification  -- the previous handle is lost here
        end
    end
end

stop() and update_spinner() both read that single field, so with two instances:

new(A) -> notification 1 ; start(A) -> state.notification = 1
new(B) -> notification 2 ; start(B) -> state.notification = 2   -- 1 cannot be reached anymore
stop(B) -> replaces 2, sets state.notification = nil
stop(A) -> state.notification is nil, so the whole notify block is skipped

Notification 1 is never replaced. It also never reaches the snacks.hide() call, because that call is guarded by the same field. update_spinner has the same problem: it draws M.state.notification with the message that its timer closure received in the first new(), so the handle and the message can belong to different instances.

Every entry in the queue already has its own handle (instance.notification, set in new()), so the needed information is there. Only the lookups go through the shared field.

Fix

Use the handle of each instance instead of M.state.notification:

• start(id) only marks its instance as ready.
• stop(id, message, level) finds its own instance and sends the notification with that instance's handle. The handle is passed as replace (used by nvim-notify) and as id (used by snacks.notifier).
• update_spinner() goes through the queue and updates every instance with its own message and handle, and stores the returned handle back on the instance.

Because each notification is now replaced by its handle, the general snacks.hide() call in stop() is not needed anymore. I removed it, which is also better because it hid the notifications of other plugins.

M.state.notification is removed. Nothing outside this module read it (get(), which the statusline uses, reads the queue), so the change stays inside the module.

Tests

The module had no tests, so I added lua/package-info/tests/suites/ui/loading_status_spec.lua with three cases:

• two instances at the same time: each stop replaces its own notification
• one instance: the result message carries the handle of that instance
• update_spinner updates every instance with its own message and handle

The tests replace vim.notify with a stub that returns and accepts handles, like a real notification backend. To make this possible, the backend detection moved from local variables into M.__has_notify_backend and M.__is_notifying().

I checked that the first test really catches the bug: when I put the old shared-field logic back, only that case fails, and it fails because the second notification is missing.

make test passes (all suites), and stylua --check . is clean.

Neovim version: v0.12.4. Notification backend used for testing: snacks.notifier.

[vuki656]

Thanks ❤️