Supply namespace information to autocompletion provider?

[MasonProtter]

One idea that came up in a discussion on Slack regarding emacs autocompletion in julia-mode is that it's hard (from what I understand) to get autocompletion for Julia that knows about user-defined types, variables, functions, etc. It was suggested to me that one possible solution would be to have julia-repl query the running repl to find a list of defined names in the running Julia session and then that list of names can be sent to company-mode for autocompletion. Is this something that is possible with the current architecture of julia-repl?

If so, how difficult would it be to implement?

Is there perhaps a different better way to get smart juno-style autocompletion in emacs for Julia that I don't know about?

[non-Jedi]

I have a plugin for lsp-mode that uses LanguageServer.jl and should do what you're asking for: https://github.com/non-Jedi/lsp-julia

To be honest, it's a bit flaky still, the README badly needs updated, and it probably needs some changes for 0.7/1.0. But I feel like long term LanguageServer.jl is gonna be what we want to use in emacs for julia completions.

[tpapp]

@MasonProtter: the current architecture does not support this, and I have don't have any obvious idea how it could be done. The problem is that julia-repl does not communicate with the process, it literally just sends text to a terminal. Doing what you suggest would probably be a different package.

I am following LanguageServer-related developments of by @non-Jedi and others with interest, and would be very happy to see a solution to these things. Think of julia-repl as an imperfect, limited solution that works now, until the good solutions emerge.

[tpapp]

Another solution I could imagine is just starting a parallel process that communicates with julia-repl, and allows basic queries. This is all feasible, but currently beyond the time I can devote do this project; it would also duplicate functionality (of lsp-julia). So I am closing this issue for now, but if anyone has something concrete that would be easy to integrate, feel free to open an issue.

[MasonProtter]

@non-Jedi What functionality from lsp-mode are you able to get working with Julia through lsp-julia? Currently I'm not able to get anything to work but I also don't really know what I'm doing

[non-Jedi]

@MasonProtter First of all, if you're on Julia 1.0.0, I haven't tested that at all yet with lsp-julia, so it could be completely broken. If you've read through the README for lsp-mode (https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode) and lsp-ui (https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-ui), and can't get stuff from there to work with Julia 0.6, please open an issue about it on https://github.com/non-Jedi/lsp-julia