[dev] Disruptive Change for Editors - ODF extension using LSP?

Dear developers,

I would like to share some (relative) new world-changing feature for
general (text) editors and IDEs that was quite in focus last week at the
FOSDEM - one of the biggest open-source conferences
<https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/> - at the "free tools and editors" track
<https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/track/free_tools_and_editors/>.

The idea:
Instead of implementing for each IDE/editor every specific language
features like ''autocomplete, goto definition, or documentation on hover"
for themselves again, they are now being implemented once for all. Added to
a - often local server - and accessed by the Language Server Protocol
<https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/overviews/lsp/overview/>
.
This idea has been pushed by the Visual Studio for Code - some general
editor <https://code.visualstudio.com/> - under the lead of Erich Gamma by
Microsoft from Switzerland.

This new way to decouple editor features for languages (document types) has
been gladly overtaken by the Eclipse IDE, which now implements within a
year all HTML5 features from VSCode reusing LSP server functionality. They
call it Eclipse Wild Web Developer
<https://projects.eclipse.org/proposals/eclipse-wild-web-developer>.

For years, I was thinking to (re)implement similar functionality as JEdit
is offering with its Archive plugin (opening a ZIP file like ODF and
accessing the content.xml directly by the editor and saving it back into
the ODF ZIP) or its XML plugin (to indent the XML and colour it - only does
not respect space handling within paragraphs).
Now I believe the time has come to implement an ODF extension for VSCode
(likely with LSP ODF functionality offered by our Toolkit).
Opening an ODT, ODS, etc. with the editor and get the view of an opened
folder with its content, opening by default the content.xml. Providing
highlight, perhaps even autocompletion according to the ODF grammar,
showing what is XML is allowed in that context! :-)

I have only started with the beginner's example:
https://code.visualstudio.com/api/language-extensions/language-server-extension-guide

Using a Ubuntu within a VirtualBox, but the npm does not compile for me -
so I rather wrote this email...

Perhaps someone is curious about this feature and would like to take the
lead, as I am at the XML conference in Prague <https://www.xmlprague.cz/>
next week and have no time atm.

Looking forward to hearing some feedback,
Svante

-- 
To unsubscribe e-mail to: dev+unsubscribe@odftoolkit.org
Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: https://listarchives.odftoolkit.org/dev/
Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy