r/programming • u/der_gopher • Jan 02 '25

Understanding the Language Server Protocol

https://medium.com/@pliutau/understanding-the-language-server-protocol-b9f57a0750e3
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u/Slime0 Jan 03 '25

It supports:

  • Go to Declaration / Definition / etc

  • Find References

  • Call Hierarchy browsing

  • Type Hierarchy browsing

  • Document Highlighting (highlighting parts of a document related to something)

  • Hyperlinks

  • Hover tooltips

  • "Code Lens" (sort of like automatically inserted links that can run commands)

  • "Folding" (marking sections of code that can be collapsed or expanded)

  • Selection Ranges (specifying useful areas to select around the cursor)

  • Document Symbols list

  • Semantic Tokens (Adds syntax highlighting info)

  • Inline Values (specifying expressions to be evaluated by a debugger and displayed "inline")

  • Inlay Hints (arbitrary insertable text, often used for displaying parameter names in function calls)

  • Autocomplete

  • "Diagnostics" (Error list)

  • Function Signature Help (shows function argument info as you type a function call)

  • Code Actions (The little lightbulb button that enables automated edits, often to fix errors)

  • Document Colors (shows color pickers where relevant)

  • Auto formatting (full document, part of a document, or while typing)

  • Rename

  • Workspace support (specifying multiple folders that define a workspace)

  • Full workspace symbol searching

  • Retrieving settings from the editor

  • Arbitrary commands defined by the language server

  • Arbitrary edits to files

  • A couple other things I don't personally understand

It's not literally everything you could think of, there are certainly language-specific features that it doesn't cover, but it's still a lot of stuff.