I used emacs for OCaml development for many years, then switched to vscode a few years ago. I’ve been pretty happy with the ocaml-lsp-server extension, the language support seems very comparable to emacs with tuareg/merlin. I happened to be looking at ocaml.org and noticed this blurb: OCaml has g…

[image] ghulette: So my question is: what are these “deep integrations” and how to do they go beyond what’s available in vscode? I don’t think you are missing much. I think there are one or two features that are not available due to limitations in the lsp protocol. See this message for more i…

That’s a helpful link, thanks. Sounds like the main missing thing is viewing expression types. I actually do remember using that in emacs and thinking it was useful, but on the other hand I apparently didn’t miss it enough to notice!

[image] ghulette: do remember using that in emacs and thinking it was useful, but on the other hand I apparently didn’t miss it enough to notice! Interesting ! My gut feeling is that I couldn’t do without it :–)

I played around with this and actually there is a partial solution – if you hover over subexpressions it will pop up a little window with the type. So, that’s nice. I wish I could figure out how to trigger the popup with the keyboard though. Also I haven’t figured out if there is a way to pick out …

You can use the Expand Selection command to grow the selection and trigger the typing with the Show hover command but sadly it seems like it still only takes the cursor’s location into account.

There’s a simple (but tedious) workaround. Surround the expression you would like lsp to infer with parentheses and trigger the hover while the cursor is on one of the parentheses characters.

VSCode vs vim/emacs for OCaml

Learning

dbuenzli September 22, 2022, 6:43pm 2

I don’t think you are missing much. I think there are one or two features that are not available due to limitations in the lsp protocol. See this message for more information.

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VSCode vs vim/emacs for OCaml

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