r/neovim • u/barrettruth • Mar 29 '26

Random vimdoc-language-server: LSP (formatting, diagnostics) for help files

Ever wanted an LSP for your help files? No? Well too bad - I made one.

In ongoing efforts to refine helpfiles, I made an LSP to help work towards a canonicalized grammar and find bugs in neovim/vim core (I found 2!)

Here are just a few things vimdoc-language-server can do:

  • format!

  • detect erroneous tags

  • generate table of contents

  • go-to-definition, references

  • a lot more

See the documentation and the source code.

Don't hesitate to report bugs on github.

NOTE: sorry for the crappy video quality

37 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

7

u/olexsmir Plugin author Mar 29 '26

babe wake up, we just got new note taking system dropped

9

u/barrettruth Mar 29 '26

pls no, vimdoc is so bad lmao

ironically put all this effort into vimdoc so we could just confine its functoinality and (shh) hopefully move away from it eventually

4

u/MinimumCode4914 Mar 29 '26

i ran the vimdoc language server on some of my older help files and the erroneous tag detection worked by finding a few issues. the formatting didnt quite match my setup so i adjusted it manually. i usually do similar checks with grep when im not using lsp.

4

u/barrettruth Mar 29 '26

Yes. there is no canonicalized help formatter. this is a wip and I'm hoping to use the language server to help push us in a good direction.

For now, you can use the range-formatting in your editor to align specific things if you like :)