Snippet support

[ismay]

I have been looking into kak-lsp's snippet support. From the docs it seems like there should be support for snippets: https://github.com/kak-lsp/kak-lsp#snippets. In my configuration I've enabled snippet support with snippet_support = true.

Now I've tested this with the typescript language server in a javascript file. The ts language server is working as expected. I would expect common patterns like a for loop to be completed as a snippet, as can be seen in the vscode docs here for example: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/userdefinedsnippets#_builtin-snippets. But that does not work with kak-lsp out of the box, all that happens is that the language server in kakoune suggests completing the for keyword.

The documentation on kak-lsp's snippet support is a little sparse. Should there be autocompletion via snippets for common language features like a for loop, a switch, etcetera? Does the user need to install these snippets themselves?

[sclu1034]

What you've linked are snippets built into VSCode, while language servers are extensions. Unless the snippets are actually emitted as regular completion items by a language server, they would not exist in kak-lsp.

[ismay]

I see. So what exactly are the snippets alluded to in kak-lsp's documentation then? It's a little unclear to me what functionality kak-lsp's snippet capabilites are supposed to provide, if not the type of completions referred to in vscode's docs.

[krobelus]

yeah snippets are supported (see 22b0602 for how they usually work) but we don't have VSCode's extra user-defined snippets. They need to come from the language server. With rust-analyzer there are lots of snippets.

user-defined snippets could go into a dedicated snippets plugin

[ismay]

yeah snippets are supported (see 22b0602 for how they usually work) but we don't have VSCode's extra user-defined snippets. They need to come from the language server. With rust-analyzer there are lots of snippets.

I see. So I guess then that the typescript language server just doesn't ship with a lot of snippets (as I don't think I've encountered any so far).

user-defined snippets could go into a dedicated snippets plugin

So you mean a plugin like https://github.com/occivink/kakoune-snippets for example? I'm assuming there's no way to supply user defined snippets that would somehow be picked up by kak-lsp (or the underlying language servers) right, you'd have to just use a separate plugin?

[krobelus]

Ideally the the language server supplies snippets, then it works for all editors.

it's possible to add a new completer option that works like lsp_completions.
It's probably not ergonomic because you'd need to match a few implementation details.

[ismay]

Ok cool. Yeah then I'll just add snippets through the kakoune-snippets plugin. That sounds like the most ergonomic solution. Thanks for explaining!