Helix integration

[jerabaul29]

Thank you for this crate - it looks really amazing! :)

Is there a way to use this in helix already / is there a PR or similar on the helix project? If so, could this be linked to either from a pinned issue, and / or from the readme of this repo, to make it easier to find? :)

[the-mikedavis]

There isn't currently an integration branch in Helix but I opened up helix-editor/helix#11660 with ideas on how the integration should look. There's a branch/commit linked in that issue that has the very very naive integration I use locally helix-editor/helix#11660 (comment)

Currently I'm working on the suggest function as time allows (which is around half way complete) and then I'd look at working on the integration. In the meantime I'll keep this issue pinned and add a link in the README when there's a branch

[jvoisin]

May I suggest an integration via LSP, so that more editors might make use of this?

[the-mikedavis]

It could be cool to expose this as a language server as well. That's not something I'm interested in working on personally but with changes we have planned for Helix's tree-sitter integration it might be possible to port out the significant parts of the Helix integration and make it a standalone language server usable with other editors.

It might also be possible to use Spellbook in existing language servers like Harper which include their own Hunspell-like internals. (Harper's implementation works a bit differently than Hunspell though - it expands affixes in its main lookup table, same with ZSpell and Vale - so this is probably not a straightforward change.)

[jerabaul29]

Looks like someone is working on a LSP combining spellbook + treesitter. https://github.com/blopker/codebook . No idea if it is useable out of the box in helix though. See blopker/codebook#30 .

[blopker]

It seems like Codebook is working well with Helix! (see same issue as above: blopker/codebook#30) That being said, I'm sadly not a Helix user. @the-mikedavis, would you be open to helping me find a good way to deliver Codebook as a Helix plugin in an idiomatic way? I'm not finding a ton of documentation online.

[the-mikedavis]

Currently Helix doesn't have a plugin system (also see helix-editor/helix#8675) so for now the only integration that can work is through LSP. So for a plugin you would need to wait for the plugin system to land.

Probably before then though we will add Spellbook directly with a similar setup to Codebook (i.e. using tree-sitter queries). I'll post the branch here once I get around to properly integrating Spellbook with Helix - I'm working on it in the background but it's a fairly big chunk of work.

[blopker]

Very cool. I'd also be happy to donate/move Codebook to Helix, as long as the architecture will also allow the LSP to continue to work. There are so many editors without a good spell checker, or implementing one in their own way.

That being said, at this point, I'm finding that dictionary management will actually be the hardest problem to solve in the long term. A complete solution might end up looking like a package manager for dictionaries.

Let me know if you'd like to discuss!

[the-mikedavis]

I don't think the code bases would be compatible enough for us to add or maintain codebook as a dependency - mostly that we will operate directly on the rope we use to represent buffers and we are about to switch away from the tree-sitter crate to our own custom bindings. Generally we are very dependency averse anyways.

In our integration though I will try to maintain some level of compatibility with codebook: we should be able to use similar queries and the same dictionaries. Some sort of package manager (or even just a big git repo - that is what we will eventually use for our tree-sitter language support files [grammars, queries, etc.]) could work for that - I haven't thought about sourcing dictionaries much yet.