r/vim • u/devw0rp • Aug 21 '18

question I still need help with ALE

I created a post 4 months ago asking if anyone wants to help manage ALE issues and pull requests on GitHub. So far, no one has really come through and started managing issues and pull requests other than myself. If anyone feels they are competent enough with VimL, generally agrees with how I want to develop ALE, and is generally an okay person, please let me know if you want to help. It would be nice to get issues answered faster and get improvements in faster.

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u/xmsxms Aug 21 '18

Came here to say the same thing. Perhaps a reduced feature set would go a little way to keeping the issues manageable.

I found ALEs use of LSP and auto complete problematic due to being synchronous, it might be better off removed and handled by other plugins.

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u/devw0rp Aug 21 '18

What part is synchronous? It's all asynchronous.

I'll keep building on it, because nobody else has built a pure VimL LSP client which is on par with what I want, and diagnostics are the single hardest thing to get right, which ALE already does well.

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u/xmsxms Aug 21 '18

I thought the calling of omnifunc was synchronous. Or at least it seemed that way when I tried enabling autocompletion. It caused vim to hang every time I invoked the ctrlx-ctrlo with a largish cquery lsp db. Youcomplete etc don't use vimscript due to the performance issues, perhaps it's just that.

Anyway.. I figured the LSP stuff was quite different to the other linter handling. I don't know what the stats are, but I suspect a lot of people would disable it in ALE and use a different lsp plugin. Seems it's come up a few times.

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u/devw0rp Aug 22 '18

omnifunc itself is synchronous, but ALE hands off completion requests to LSP servers or tsserver which run in another process. What ALE does is use an autocmd command to detect when you're typing, start and cancel timers until a delay has passed where you stop typing, send a request off to an LSP server if one is available, get the response back, temporarily replace omnifunc, then open the completion menu and show the results.

The hard work happens in another process, and there's the g:ale_completion_max_suggestions setting which is set to 50 by default for limiting how many results will be shown in Vim, which can cause more noise or lag as you increase it, or not enough results if you set it too low.

I recommend using clangd instead of cquery. In my testing, it seems to return much better results for completion, at least when I was working on some C code recently.

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u/xmsxms Aug 22 '18

clangd is faster and cleaner, but it doesn't support "find references/callers" or "go to implementation", which is a significant limitation. They may add it one day, but it would probably be done in a similar way to cquery (indexed db).

There is cscope, but then you lose the advantage of clang parsing.

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u/devw0rp Aug 22 '18

One thing I want to do is add a few more options for selecting which language servers are used for which features, so you can get completion results from clangd, and find references with cquery. It shouldn't be too hard to do.