
Moreover, it seems that they are truly extensions to a vanilla Language Server, which means that coc should work to some degree without them (although I haven’t tried). I’m willing to overlook this since I’m only using Vim for development these days and VSCode also has this behavior. This seems to defeat the purpose of installing a Language Server in the first place.
#Install supertab install
I almost always have to install a “coc extension” for a particular language in order to use all of the features of coc.nvim. Some downsides of coc.nvimĪfter setting up my Language Servers and playing around with my autocomplete, I noticed a several drawbacks of coc.nvim: My simple coc-settings.json is available here in case the formatting is unclear. Miraculously, C++ needed no configuration, which made me unreasonably happy. The coc.nvim Github page has a list of sample entries for some popular languages, which I shamelessly copied to build my own configuration file.įor Python, I was able to copy the entry as is.įor Latex, I needed to change the command field to point to texlab’s location. This file should live in the ~/.vim directory and contain a single JSON dictionary, with a key languageserver, whose value contains the configuration required for each Language Server. The final step is writing the coc-settings.json configuration file. I was pleasantly surprised by how painless this was to setup.įirst, coc.nvim runs on nodejs, so I need to install it along with yarn: It seems that others have success with other plugins, so by all means try these out for yourself. These are very promising signs for the future of an open-source project. Other popular alternatives were LanguageClient-neovim and vim-lsp, but I settled on coc.nvim because i.) it is extremely popular and ii.) the maintainers are unbelievably active.
#Install supertab code
acquire the superpowers of smart code completion in Vim.This sounded great to me, so I decided to dive back into the wild world of Vim plugins and configurations to integrate this into my workflow. This also has the nice benefit of keeping your editor fast and snappy while the Language Server does the heavy lifting asynchronously. More importantly, because a Language Server is a real server, the source code and build system can live on a remote server and communicate with client editors remotely over TCP. Instead, the Language Server model requires each editor to interface with a Language Server via JSON and for each language to implement a Language Server, which is \(m\) editor plugins and \(n\) Language Servers.Įssentially, if you have a Language Server installed on your machine, each editor on your machine with an LSP plugin can use it.
#Install supertab full
Well, if there are \(m\) editors and \(n\) languages, full language support for all editors requires implementing \(m \cdot n\) plugins for each editor-language pair. Instead of the editor directly calling python or clang to analyze the code, it makes a request to a Language Server to provide the information needed to support the smart feature. It’s basically an interface layer between an editor and a language. It seems that the secret sauce of VSCode is the Language Server Protocol (LSP), which is a standardized protocol introduced by Microsoft for communication between an editor and something called a Language Server.Ī Language Server is meant to provide the language-specific smarts and communicate with development tools over a protocol that enables inter-process communication. Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot of praise for VSCode, a new(ish) editor from Microsoft. Microsoft to the rescue with Language Servers I would lying if I said that I didn’t miss these features, though. However, I ultimately remove them out of frustration or dissatisfaction and return to the ever-faithful supertab, which is a text-based autocomplete plugin that is mildly smarter than the built-in ones. I’ve tried many times to do so YCM comes to mind. Unfortunately, the process of setting up and properly configuring plugins for these features can be a daunting task. The most frequent criticism of this that I’ve heard is something to effect of: “There’s no autocomplete/error-checking/smart-refactoring/something else in Vim! How can you program like this?!”Īlthough this isn’t technically true (the built-in autocomplete features are actually pretty good), it’s a decent point.Īutocomplete and its intelligent cousins, broadly referred to as “intellisense”, are useful tools.


I spend the majority of my time on a computer using Vim in one form or another.
