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Comment by benatkin | Hacker News Reader

Arguably a protocol for Visual Studio Code to...

That's simply not true; there are LSP client implementations/integrations for vim, neovim, emacs, sublime text, web environments like gitpod.io, Eclipse IDE (via Theia IDE), Jetbrains supports it in their IDEs, and Visual Studio even has some level of support for it.

LSP is _the_ way to write IDE integrations in the modern era.

(I maintain LSP tooling for F# and actively support at least half of the editors above)

It's neither true nor false, it's an opinion. Sure "LSP" has support built in or tacked on (as plugins), mostly tacked on, to other editors. Nobody is required to assume TypeScript docs for a supposedly language-agnostic protocol, or that particular flavor of JSON-RPC, or JSON-RPC, or even JSON. And the pill I don't want to swallow, that people using LSP tend to swallow, is getting full definitions with autocomplete, or hover. Most of the time I prefer to just see completions when I autocomplete, not full definitions. It is clutter.

I'm not at all sure what you mean by 'typescript docs' in your comment. The protocol for things like tooltips/signature completion literally just says 'put arbitrary markdown here'. It doesn't proscribe the structure of the text the LSP author decides to use.

There are also many different display/view methods that more sophisticated LSP implementations can implement. In my own LSP, we have different 'views' of the signatures/types/docs for

* hovers * signature completion * detailed type-level embedded docs in a separate pane

to name a few. It's entirely customizable.

The official docs for LSP express the format in TypeScript rather than plain english or something like JSON schema. https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/specifi... If it pointed to TypeScript docs to brush up on it that would be one thing but it assumes TypeScript knowledge.

Yes, but it's s remarkably stupid opinion unsupported by any evidence, and countered by the number of editors that have embraced LSP.

If you're angry about it, feel free to produce something better.

I think in this case, worse is better, so I'm not gonna try to produce something better, thanks.

These editors that have supposedly embraced LSP are perhaps throwing a bone to people who want to turn them into IDEs. If people don't use the LSPs, they keep the integrity of the editor - it is an editor, not an IDE. Whereas people who set up an LSP can go nuts. I'd like to see some stats about what % of neovim users are using an LSP plugin. I'm not.

Use Vi or Notepad if you want "just an editor".

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