[ANN] Release of ocaml-eglot 1.0.0
Hi everyone!
We (at Tarides) are particularly pleased to announce the first release of OCaml-eglot, An overlay on Eglot (the built-in LSP client for Emacs) for editing OCaml!
- Github repository
- Package on MELPA
- Features list
- Installation procedure
- Comparison table with Merlin
More precisely
Typically, developers who use Emacs (43.7%
in 2022, according to the OCaml User Survey) use a major mode (such as the venerable caml-mode, or tuareg) and Merlin to provide IDE services. In 2016, Microsoft has released LSP, a generic protocol for interacting with editors which, at first, was only used by Visual Studio Code, but, since 2020, has really become the norm. De-facto, following the LSP standard gives very good default (completion, jump to definition, …). OCaml has excellent LSP (ocaml-lsp-server) support, which is used in particular by the OCaml platform for Visual Studio Code.
With the aim of reducing maintenance for all possible editors, going LSP seems to be a good direction. A pertinent choice, especially since the major historical editors (such as Vim and Emacs) offer, in their recent versions, LSP clients out of the box. However, in the same way that the OCaml client for VSCode integrates OCaml-specific features, it was necessary to support these features on the Emacs side (and in the future, Vim) to compete with Merlin, which is the goal of ocaml-eglot
, to provide a tailored development experience for OCaml code editing!
User feedback and future development
We’ve just released the first version of OCaml-eglot, and, much like the various editor-related projects (Merlin, Vscode-ocaml-platform, Merlin for Emacs, Merlin for Vim), we’re more than open to community collaboration, user feedback, in order to provide the best possible user experience!
Happy Hacking!