Re: How to approach a ConTeXt language server?

[Henning Hraban Ramm <texml@fiee.net>]

> Am 2020-02-04 um 16:45 schrieb Philipp A. <flying-sheep@web.de>:
> 
> Language servers are the new big deal in editor and IDE development: https://langserver.org/
> 
> It would be cool to have a ConTeXt one for autocompletion (for ConTeXt: command names, \cite IDs, labels, named parameters, …), go-to-definition, hover information (docs about a command) and so on.
> The way it works is that you have a server process that is the source of truth for all this information, and the editor passes requests to it.
> The editor tells the server when it opens/closes files and when the user requests something of the above.
> 
> The way I’d implement it in ConTeXt is to keep a list of open ConTeXt projects in the server (obtained by following \include, \component, \product, \environment, \project).
> Now my questions begin:
> 	• Then I’d make context load the project without compiling it to a PDF but make it execute some Lua (how do I do this?)
> 	• I’d need a way to get all available commands with their signatures into Lua. I assume this is done here, but how? http://www.pragma-ade.nl/general/qrcs/setup-en.pdf

Look for the interface files i-*.xml

> 	• Optimally, for hover information and completion, I’d want some help/doc text for each command that has some. Is there a way to get it?

No, there isn’t. It could be in the interface files if someone would put in the work.

> 	• Optimally, for label autocompletion, I’d also like a list of defined labels. Since I played around with bibliographies I already know how to query the bibliography DB from Lua.
> 	• Optimally I’d also want some parse tree of each document, but I assume the way macros work, this doesn’t exist? This would make things easier that I’d otherwise have to (imperfectly) parse out of the document (due to things like catcode changes, but I guess I can pretend they don’t exist and \unprotect is always on)

You could run ConTeXt and use the export XML.

> 	• Optimally, for go-to-definition, I’d also want a list of files ConTeXt loaded so I can find definitions in it.
> Can anyone help me, especially with 1-2? To get me started, it would be great to have an example script and a command line to invoke it, which makes ConTeXt load a main tex file, execute some Lua, and exit without creating a document or writing anything else to the channel Lua writes to (stdout?).

Look at the .tuc file that’s created in a ConTeXt run, it’s a Lua table and contains “all“ the information about the project.


Greetlings, Hraban
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