Lexical

Lexical is a next-generation language server for the Elixir programming language.

Features

• Context aware code completion
• As-you-type compilation
• Advanced error highlighting
• Code actions
• Code Formatting
• Go To Definition
• Completely isolated build environment

What makes Lexical different?

There are a couple things that lexical does differently than other language servers. Let’s look at what separates it from the pack.

Architecture

When lexical starts, it boots an erlang virtual machine that runs the language server and its code. It then boots a separate virtual machine that runs your project code and connects the two via distribution. This provides the following benefits:

• None of lexical’s dependencies will conflict with your project. This means that lexical can make use of dependencies to make developing in it easier without having to “vendor” them. It also means that you can use lexical to work on your project, even if lexical depends on your project.
• Your project can depend on a different version of elixir and erlang than lexical itself. This means that lexical can make use of the latest versions of elixir and erlang while still supporting projects that run on older versions.
• The build environment for your project is only aware of your project, which enables as-you-type compilation and error reporting.
• In the future, there is a possibility of having the lexical vm instance control multiple projects

Lexical 0.4.0 Has been released!

Get it here: Release v0.4.0 · lexical-lsp/lexical · GitHub
Github: GitHub - lexical-lsp/lexical: Lexical is a next-generation elixir language server · GitHub

The main thrust of v0.4 is hover support and quality of life improvements. Now, when you hover over a module or function, you’ll see relevant documentation, types and parameters. We’ve also spent a lot of time working on completions in #410, which makes them more consistent, fixes some bugs in certain language clients (like eglot adding an extra @ when completing module attributes), and greatly improves their feel in vscode.

Additionally, quite a few of the changes in this PR were about laying the groundwork for our indexing infrastructure, which will debut in the next version. But fear not, this version has indexing disabled.

I want to thank @zachallaun and @scottming for all their hard work on this release. They’ve made lexical faster, more friendly and have removed a bunch of bugs!

Highlights include:

• Document hover for functions and modules
• Improved boot scripts
• Automatically updating nix flake. Thanks, @hauleth
• Helix editor integration. Thanks @philipgiuliani
• .heex integration
• Massively improved completions (Check out the PR, it’s too big to summarize)

Bugs fixed:

• Longstanding unicode completion / editing bugs slain. Unicode works perfectly now.