ocaml-lsp VS kickstart.nvim

> There is no alternative to Django, for instance.

https://aantron.github.io/dream/, which is new and used by ocaml.org

> No serious IDE, except emacs

and vim, and visual studio, and whatever else supports the LSP protocol via https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-lsp

> The standard library was so lacking that there is at least an alternative.

While janestreet does have an publish their own stdlib, I personally try to stick to the stdlib whenever possible. Not to knock janestreet. I'm glad they're around and have contributed a bunch.

But overall I agree with you. It's been my favorite language two write in for years now. You can't just reach for off-the-shelf libraries for every little thing. Although the ones that do exist tend to be written halfway decently.

Merlin is great, but it's vim plugin leaves a bit to be desired (in particular, it doesn't seem to use any of the modern async apis from vim 8+/neovim). Personally ocaml-lsp (which is still backed by Merlin on the backend) together with neovim's built-in lsp support has been far smoother for me

Perhaps the README[1] is out of date, but it appears to note that textDocument/implementation is not done? That's a pretty big hole.

[1]: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-lsp/#features

Short answer: yesWith https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ocamllabs.ocaml-platformand https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-lspand https://dune.readthedocs.io/en/stable/and utop

This is the one I tried and seems well supported - https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-lsp . I've only started very lightly playing around with ocaml. It seems to be working fine on vscode and seems to do as expected on nvim too, at least as far as I configured nvim for it.

Typically I would recommend using https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-lsp which is now the main OCaml language server, and VSCode with the OCaml Platform extension, a combo I know works well.

You might also look into ocaml-lsp for inspiration. Not everything will carry over to SML but it might help somtimes.

Out of the box it offers almost nothing, but after 7 years of development I like that. I love the idea of customizing to my needs my IDE, so with the help of kickstart.nvim I have with 1 minute of installing and 10 extra minutes of configuration a complete IDE.

I recently started coding with Neovim using kickstart.nvim as the template for my editor configuration. I downloaded the python-lsp-server package using Mason, but I was disappointed to discover that the IntelliSense on my third party dependencies didn't work. The LSP was resolving to my global Python installation, which did not have the packages from my virtual environment (venv) installed.

First thing I did was get kickstart.nvim. I had heard it was extremely useful (and it was). It was very easy to install. I start reading through init.lua, and it told me to run :Tutor, which is almost 1,000 lines of learning how to use Neovim, to which I obviously ran that command and started reading. Obviously, it takes a bit of time to complete :Tutor, but it's well worth it. "hjkl" wasn't too hard to get used to, also repeating motions by using numbers was useful, such as using '5dd' to delete 5 lines. I highly suggest reading this file, especially since I didn't really know about the different modes, which is probably why I failed to switch the other times. You would start writing your code, then Neovim would say that it can't find that command, you would accidently type an i and then start typing, and so on, it was a nightmare. For those that don't know the modes, here is each mode and how to get between them.

I also suggest against using distributions. Instead of learning how to configure nvim itself you're learning to configure that specific distro.

I suggest to take someone's lua config and start from there. Kickstart.nvim is a good one: https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim

1) the option I wouldn’t chose, use Kickstarter. It’s a minimal starter config, using a single init.lua that helps you build a config slowly. https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim

I highly recommend Lazyvim for if you want to have a VSCode (ish) like experience that still exposes you to configuring in Lua. Or Kickstart.nvim if you want a more "from scratch" experience

In case it is helpful, I am using kickstart.nvim with only minor modifications.

One of the project goals is to become something like kickstart.nvim. Or, to be a reference if someone doesn't know how to do something.