lintplus VS language-server-protocol-inspector

Former contributor and user of Lite XL here.

It's an awesome little editor. I quit using it though because it seemed like the future direction of the project wasn't very clear, and from a practical standpoint VS Code simply has a better developer experience, but I had great fun hacking around it nevertheless.

One of my favorite things about rxi/lite and Lite XL is just how easy it is to write plugins. Simply create a new .lua file in the plugins directory and monkey-patch whatever you need. And while it might seem like monkey-patching isn't the most clean solution, that's not exactly true — the source code of the editor doesn't need to be cluttered with explicit hooks, and plugins interoperate with each other very well, because one plugin doesn't know about the others' existence. From its standpoint it just modifies the vanilla editor.

This extensibility allowed me to write some really cool stuff, the one plugin I'm especially proud of is lint+ [1], which leverages the immediate mode nature of the UI to draw pretty lint messages atop the text editor (and it even renders Rust's friendly compiler errors with little rails on the left! see issue #3 [2]).

Can recommend.

  [1]: https://github.com/liquidev/lintplus

I desperately want this. I find text editors w/ basic linting to be too limited but full IDE's like Idea or even VSCode too heavy for some devices. Something in between :(. I've given up laptop development and am forced to work with my desktop until I can afford a better laptop because Idea/VSCode runs so slowly.

FWIW, I use lite (https://github.com/rxi/lite) if I need a very lightweight text editor that has rust linting (https://github.com/liquidev/lintplus) and Idea if I'm at my desktop.

I wonder if these performance issues apply to all language extensions that rely on a language server (implemented in VSCode or otherwise). From what I understand, since JSON [0] is used over the wire between the editor and the language server process, there's a lot of serialisation/deserialisation overhead.

Microsoft used to maintain a log inspector [1] which you could use to see the chatter between the server and client, and there was a _lot_ of chatter with a _lot_ of JSON.

[0] https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/overvie...

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/language-server-protocol-inspec...