ultisnips VS nvim-lspconfig

I always like people's LaTeX-based note taking setups. I'm a mathematician, so I write a lot of LaTeX too. (And I use vim, so I really like vim+Latex workflows).

It's interesting that this post (or rather, the later post that discusses this) talks about the advantages of UltiSnips. The well-known vim-LaTeX posts written by Gilles Castel (RIP) relied pivotally on UltiSnips.

It's not just that UltiSnips is a snippet engine. There are many of those (including LuaSnip, the other snippet engine mentioned in the OP series of articles). It's that UltiSnips can dispatch arbitrary expressions to short python code sections, and python has a great scientific library. For example, it's trivial to write a `sympy` snippet that will simplify or compute a given expression and write the output in latex for you.

But UltiSnips works *terribly* with neovim [1] [2]. Why? Because UltiSnips uses python, and neovim's python interface is 100x slower than vim's python interface. There are design decisions for this and I'm not trying to say that neovim is bad. I use both vim and neovim. But I use vim+UltiSnips+vimtex for writing LaTeX.

LuaSnip has interpolation too. I suppose it would be possible to write more code that calls from LuaSnip to a system like sympy (or other). But that's work. On the other hand, I think it takes a true power user to actually want or use the fancy interpolation functions.

[1]: https://github.com/SirVer/ultisnips/issues/974

I think in-the-wild examples like Ultisnips deoplete semshi (although they are advanced and somewhat complex) would also be good examples to learn how one can use python for writing plugins.

I didn't know lsp-zero, but this integration seems just for me except for that I am using UltiSnips instead of luasnip. Just curious how difficult do you think it is to add UltiSnips integration along with cmp-nvim-ultisnips?

If you use UltiSnips, you can just do this:

Snipets or code completion can be done in a number of different ways, and how that is configured will depend on what method you use. In the blog he uses the vim plugin ultisnips. You'll find details on configuration for that in that link.

Heyo, I've been trying to get UltiSnips and YouCompleteMe to work, however, I've ran into a bit of a problem. The python36.dll library does not seem to exist for UltiSnips, and YouCompleteMe cannot locate python at all (screenshots at bottom).

I suggest looking for blog posts about this, you're gunnuh wanna pick out a plugin manager and stuff. It's kind of like a package manager for neovim. You can install everything manually but usually you manually install a plugin manager and it gives you commands to manage the rest of your plugins.

These two plugins are the bare minimum in my view.

https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter

Treesitter gives you much better syntax highlighting based on a parser for a given language.

https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig

This plugin helps you connect to a given language LSP quickly with sensible defaults. You more or less pick your language from here and copy paste a snippet, and then install the relevant LSP:

https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig/blob/master/doc/ser...

For Python you'll want pylsp. For JavaScript it will depend on what frontend framework you're using, I probably can't help you there.

pylsp itself takes some plugins and you'll probably want them. https://github.com/python-lsp/python-lsp-server

Best of luck! Happy hacking.

Adding language support it neovim isn't very difficult once you're setup. I use nvim-lspconfig[1] and just about any language you could need is documented[2]. But like others have mentioned there are batteries included distributions of neovim if that's your cup of tea.

[1]: https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig/

[2]: https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig/blob/master/doc/ser...

If we can't find the basic usage in the documentation we can go to nvim-lspconfig's github repository. In there we look for a folder called server_configurations, this contains configuration files for a bunch of language servers.

https://github.com/hrsh7th/nvim-cmp This is an autocompletion engine https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter This allows NeoVim to install parsing scripts so NeoVim can do things like code highlighting. https://github.com/williamboman/mason.nvim Not strictly necessary, but allows you to access a repo of LSP, install them, and configure them for without you actively messing about in config files. https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig Also not strictly necessary, but vastly simplifies LSP setup. https://github.com/williamboman/mason-lspconfig.nvim This lets the above two plugins talk to each other more easily.

This specific issue talks about fixing clangd for that error: https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig/issues/2184. The issue is ongoing for ccls AFAIK but for clangd, this has been discussed and fixed in the past already.

I am trying to set up the pbkit language server for protobuf files. Since it is not part of the nvim-lspconfig repo's server configurations, I have to figure the way out myself. It doesn't seem to be too difficult, as I can start from the bufls configuration there. The following is what I have at the moment:

I have configured neovim with lspconfig and mason. Added the suggested configuration of the lsp config(https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig) to ~/.config/nvim/after/plugin/lsp.lua Then I installed via mason the following language servers:

Personally, i think nvim-lint is the best alternative currently, specially so because it has no dependencies on external binaries. This guide assumes you already have your LSP set up with nvim-lspconfig (or an alternative like lsp-zero). You should also have an way to install the linters you are gonna need, i highly recommend Mason with mason-lspconfig.

Basically neovim can act as a client to a variety of different language servers (https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig/blob/master/doc/ser...) which give neovim IDE capabilities. This can be done in original Vim also but requires external plugins which can be a pain to compile and install. Neovim has it built in.

I'm struggling to get [sqlls](https://github.com/joe-re/sql-language-server) with [nvim-lspconfig](https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig) to use Postgres syntax.