vim-tss

TypeScript language services integration for Neovim

What it does

This plugin provides a means for starting an instance of tsserver and interacting with it in Vim. Individual TS commands such as 'format' or 'rename' are implemented as standalone command line scripts. This allows Vim to make use of the efficiency gains of tsserver without requiring complex Vim scripts.

Architecture

The plugin consists of reasonably thin layer of Vim script that calls out to several JavaScript scripts. All the support scripts are written in TypeScript and compiled to JavaScript for execution. They include:

• close - Let tsserver know a file is no longer being edited.
• completions - Ask for possible completions at a given position and file.
• errors - List compile errors for a given file.
• format - List edits required to properly format a given file
• open - Let tsserver know a file is being edited.
• start - Starts an instance of tsserver and acts as a proxy for it, both on stdin and stdout, and on a bound TCP port.

Client scripts such as open and errors open connections to the running server's port to communicate with it. They write a JSON request to the server process's stdin, and wait for a JSON response on its stdout.

The specific port used by the server may be specified with a -p or --port option. If not specified, the server fill locate an open port. Once a server has been started, it will report the bound port number in an sh-compatible environment variable assignment, like VIM_TSS_PORT=12345. If this environment variable is set in a shell, all commands run in that shell will automatically connect to that port. Otherwise, the port must be specified when each command is called.

Installation

Note that the current version of this plugin only supports Neovim.

Install the plugin however you like (vim-plug, Pathogen, etc.). After installing the plugin, run npm install to build the support scripts.

Using vim-plug, the plugin line might look like:

Plug 'jason0x43/vim-tss', { 'for': [ 'typescript', 'javascript' ], 'do': 'npm install' }

The plugin will try to use tsserver from TypeScript in various locations in the following order:

• User-provided - tsserver script specified on the command line when running start.js
• Global - from a globally installed TypeScript
• Current project - from a project-local install of TypeScript
• Plugin - from the plugin's own install of TypeScript

Usage

See the vimdoc