nix-config-ryan4yin/home/base/tui/editors/Glossary.md

Editors Glossary

LSP - Language Server Protocol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Server_Protocol

https://langserver.org/

The Language Server Protocol (LSP) is an open, JSON-RPC-based protocol for use between source code editors or integrated development environments (IDEs) and servers that provide programming language-specific features like:

• motions such as go-to-definition, find-references, hover.
• code completion
• marking of warnings and errors
• refactoring routines
• syntax highlighting (use Tree-sitter instead)
• code formatting (use a dedicated formatter instead)

The goal of the protocol is to allow programming language support to be implemented and distributed independently of any given editor or IDE.

LSP was originally developed for Microsoft Visual Studio Code and is now an open standard. In the early 2020s LSP quickly became a "norm" for language intelligence tools providers.

Tree-sitter

https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/

https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/comments/1109wgr/treesitter_vs_lsp_differences_ans_overlap/

Tree-sitter is a parser generator tool and an incremental parsing library. It can build a concrete syntax tree for a source file and efficiently update the syntax tree as the source file is edited.

It is used by many editors and IDEs to provide:

• syntax highlighting
• indentation
• creating foldable code regions
• Incremental selection
• simple refactoring in a single file
  • such as join/split lines, structural editing, cursor motion, etc.

Treesitter process each file independently, and it is not aware of the semantics of your code. For example, it does not know does a function/variable really exist, or what is the type/return-type of a variable. This is where LSP comes in.

The LSP server parses the code much more deeply and it not only parses a single file but your whole project. So, the LSP server will know whether a function/variable does exist with the same type/return-type. If it does not, it will mark it as an error.

LSP does understand the code semantically, while Treesitter only cares about correct syntax.

LSP vs Tree-sitter

• Tree-sitter: lightweight, fast, but limited knowledge of your code. mainly used for syntax highlighting, indentation, and folding/refactoring in a single file.
• LSP: heavy and slow on large projects, but it has a deep understanding of your code. mainly used for code completion, refactoring in the projects, errors/warnings, and other semantic-aware features.

Formatter vs Linter

Linting is distinct from Formatting because:

1. formatting only restructures how code appears.
   1. prettier is a popular formatter.
2. linting analyzes how the code runs and detects errors, it may also suggest improvements such as replace var with let or const.

Formatters and Linters process each file independently, they do not need to know about other files in the project.