Kakoune: Language Server Protocol Support

[dbettin]

Are there any plans for Kakoune to support LSP?

1. http://langserver.org/
2. https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol

[ekie]

it was discussed recently on irc and that feature would be merged. its just a matter of who will implement it.

[mawww]

Yeah, I'd be happy to have support for LSP added. I believe we already have all the needed backend features, so its just a matter or writing the support script.

[lenormf]

clangd alongside an LSP support script would clear up a lot of code from extra, as well as being potentially more maintainable.

[dbettin]

If someone wants to point me in the right direction on how to write the script, I could give it shot.

[danr]

I've started writing a monster over at https://github.com/danr/libkak

[danr]

It's actually quite usable now, give it a try!

[robertmeta]

Is LSP something that is considered "core" for Kakoune (in the editing domain, like autocomplete support)?

[doppioandante]

@robertmeta I don't think so, AFAIK LSP is just a protocol for various editor tasks that kakoune should already support, if it can be implemented externally there's no reason to have it in core, it surely isn't at in the same tier of auto completion support.
Whether it could be shipped along with it, well, hard to say, I didn't try danr's but usually kakoune plugins are meant to run everywhere POSIX (i.e. no python dependency).

[mawww]

LSP itself is not core, but whatever features are needed to implement it are. For example LSP requires a way to provide custom insert completion, fortunately we already have a system in place for that. It provides as well jumping to various locations in code, which should be implementatble using regular normal mode.

So I dont think we are missing any backend functionalities to add support to LSP. Parsing the protocol and converting that to the proper set of commands for Kakoune is exactly what the %sh{...} blocks were designed to do.

[tskinn]

Any update on this or working implementations?

[mawww]

http://github.com/ul/kak-lsp is the most advanced lsp support we have AFAIK, it works pretty well already.

[maximbaz]

The mentioned plugin works well indeed, should this issue be closed then, or you want to integrate it into kakoune itself one day?

[mawww]

I dont plan to integrate kak-lsp inside Kakoune, I am actually quite happy Kakoune starts to have an ecosystem that I do not maintain directly.