lsp-mode feature wishlist

[yyoncho]

Update

Please use the discussion issue for the wishlist now: https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode/discussions/2891

[innerout]

I believe that lsp-mode needs to enhance it's lsp-rename function because that will get Emacs closer to being a full featured IDE. For example we could get some ideas from what intellij provides.Also i think the flymake integration will be a huge + but i think that is closer to be complete as @yyoncho has started working on it.

[yyoncho]

@innerout can you elaborate on rename improvements?

[innerout]

An example from intellij


images taken from here https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/refactoring-source-code.html .
Also another interesting feature would be this https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/find-and-replace-code-duplicates.html .

[yyoncho]

@innerout we are limited by the lsp protocol and the language servers so features that are not supported by the server(s) are out of scope.

[kaiwk]

Hey, thank you for the great work!

I think it's good to have a set of customization option and a better default, because some users may not need so much powerful functionality. For instance, most of them just want a fast way to completion, find references and maybe check doc. It's sure that we may turn on some options as default for user to test and whom really want to use.

It may too early to say that easy to configure is also an important feature, but it should be taken into consideration : )

[tam5]

Would have to be thought about a bit, but in light of the new session system, would be nice to be able to persist a session across emacs reboots.

I work on fairly large, enterprisey projects that take forever to get fully processed by my language server (php). Sometimes I end up restarting emacs for whatever reason, and then have to start the process all over again.

[tam5]

Getting started / specific language server installation instructions could be made more obvious, instead of making user go to specific language server docs, understand them properly, and then translate back to getting it to work with emacs.

For me, I generally like to just copy and paste instructions..

[tam5]

Not sure if this falls within lsp, or lsp-ui, or company, but:

Would be great to see parameter hints (and/or ability to auto-fill them) when completing with lsp.

For example, VsCode would do the following:

[yyoncho]

@kaiwk thanks for the suggestion. For now I will add quick start section similar to the one in https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-java which you could just copy/paste and then start coding. We may investigate creating a meta package which joins all the packages that are needed for normal development similar to spacemacs layers. Also, if you have concrete proposals, please go ahead and file an issue or provide a PR.

[yyoncho]

@tam5

Would have to be thought about a bit, but in light of the new session system, would be nice to be able to persist a session across emacs reboots.

I work on fairly large, enterprisey projects that take forever to get fully processed by my language server (php). Sometimes I end up restarting emacs for whatever reason, and then have to start the process all over again.

can you elaborate a bit more? Unless there is a but the session should be persisted in lsp-session-file and then you won't be asked for root selection any more in any of the already imported projects, or you mean something else?

[yyoncho]

@tam5

Getting started / specific language server installation instructions could be made more obvious, instead of making user go to specific language server docs, understand them properly, and then translate back to getting it to work with emacs.

For me, I generally like to just copy and paste instruct

I believe we can do better: #506 . I will try to let lsp-mode directly consume the VSCode packages so you can just open the file and it will automatically download server, autoconfigure itself and so on.

About the signature feature: we have some code in, but I have never had a time to test it whether it works fine but in general this feature should work out of the box(currently it doesn't). Here it is a bug tracking the issue: #214

[tam5]

@yyoncho Awesome, thanks for your responses, and thanks for all your hard work!

I'll respond to the features that already seem to have issues in their rightful place, sorry for not searching first.

Regarding the session persistence:

The session is indeed persisted, to a degree, in the lsp-session-file which gives two very nice features regarding persistence:

1. No more asking for project root
2. Deleting all buffers within a project, does not shut down my language server, which is great

What I would like to potentially add:
Depending on some customization of course, when exiting emacs, do not shut down my language server. This way, I can come right back to emacs and continue my work without waiting for my language server to boot up and do all its file parsing.

This would mean preventing shut down of language server on exit, as well as reconnecting to the existing server on startup.

The only issue I see is potentially having dangling language server processes if they are not cleaned up properly.

[yyoncho]

Depending on some customization of course, when exiting emacs, do not shut down my language server. This way, I can come right back to emacs and continue my work without waiting for my language server to boot up and do all its file parsing.

I believe that this is not feasible due to multiple reasons - in general re-connection is not possible in LSP protocol, Re-connection to STDOUT is not technically possible(or at least I don't know how to do that). The only way to implement this feature is either to have some kind of server support for that or implement a proxy in front of the language server which is separate project itself.