intellij-lsp-server

I once had the idea of implementing an LSP server for Kotlin/Java by embedding it as an IntelliJ plugin and backgrounding the IDE while doing the actual coding in Emacs. It kind of worked, but once I stopped needing to use Java for my job it became too much of a hassle to flesh out. https://github.com/Ruin0x11/intellij-lsp-server

The LSP means every single language server has to reinvent the wheel again and again. It’d have been much more useful to build bindings for IDEA plugins so they could be integrated into arbitrary editors, especially as the IDEA plugins for most languages even after several years of LSP development are still superior. All in all it’s like the whole JVM vs. WASM, Java vs Electron story again, with someone deciding to reinvent the wheel but worse. There’s even bindings like https://github.com/Ruin0x11/intellij-lsp-server or https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/10209-lsp-support to glue it all back together. It’d have been much simpler to reuse an existing ecosystem from the start.

At one point I tried embedding a language server in a running IntelliJ process. It kind of worked, but a few problems led to me getting tired of maintaining it: - Constant API updates to IntelliJ internals requiring updates to the extension. - The need to run a full copy of IntelliJ in the background, and breakage in the copy leading to requiring a full restart. - A lot of concurrency problems I didn't understand because by necessity it required going deep into IntelliJ's codebase. - I was no longer using Java in my work environment or for personal projects, so I had no need to use IntelliJ. But despite this, the repo stands as the most-starred one I have. People are still starring it even though I haven't made changes in over a year and a half! https://github.com/Ruin0x11/intellij-lsp-server So it sounds like this is a thing people would

Or you could connect to IntelliJ from emacs. https://github.com/Ruin0x11/intellij-lsp-server (Though unfinished, it's at least proof the concept could work.) Personally I use omnisharp at work for C# projects, on Windows, and am able to accomplish all the tasks I need to do except debugging entirely in emacs, and get refactoring, diagnostics and completion.

I'm implementing an LSP server using IDEA as a backend, so hopefully VS Code will be able to match the functionality sometime. https://github.com/Ruin0x11/intellij-lsp-server That being said, as an implementor I'm finding cases where LSP's feature set is underdeveloped. For example, there is nothing in the spec to account for renaming files, so I can't put in my rename action without the behavior being incorrect (because if you rename a class in Java you have to rename the corresponding file, which IDEA handles). Also some things require custom LSP requests, like getting the list of build configurations to run. I think this is a product of the Java support in IDEA being so much more comprehensive than anything in LSP so far. But hopefully as the spec is improved these issues will be worked out