Live preview for simple editors like helix

[knuesel]

Motivation

Having instant preview work in Helix.

Description

The live preview would be configured from the Helix side using the initialize request. I guess this could work similarly to how it works in this fork of typst-lsp: https://github.com/tmistele/typst-lsp

(This feature is a follow-up of #357 to discuss specifically the support for editors like Helix that have limited LSP support.)

[TheZoq2]

I came up with a hack to get this feature working before helix supports custom lsp commands:

We can have a small proxy between helix and tinymist which inserts the preview commands into the LSP. For now I made a proof of concept that can start and view the preview, but forward/backward sync is not available. I'll probably look at that tomorrow.

https://gitlab.com/TheZoq2/tinypp

2024-11-15_21-38-36.mp4

[TheZoq2]

Got sync from the document to the editor working by translating the scroll events into window/showDocument requests.

I also tried adding an additional request on hover to sync from editor to document, but that seems to silently fail and I can't find exactly what I need to send

From reading the source code, it seems like something along the lines of

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"workspace/executeCommand","params":{"command":"tinymist.scrollPreview","arguments":["primary",{"character":0,"event":"panelScrollTo","filepath":""/home/frans/Documents/rust/tinymist-preview-proxy/test.typp","line":10}]},"id":"1_scroll"}

But it fails silently. @Myriad-Dreamin is there something I'm missing with that command?

[Myriad-Dreamin]

@TheZoq2 not sure the reason but your request is not a valid json.

[Myriad-Dreamin]

I updated a proposing solution to preview for simple editors:

tinymist/README.md

Lines 144 to 147 in a2cf51a

	- Improve Typst Preview.
	- Browsing mode: if no main file is specified, the preview will be in browsing mode and use the recently focused file as the main.
	- Pin drop-down: Set the file to preview in the drop-down for clients that doesn't support passing arguments to the preview command.
	- Render in web worker (another thread) to reduce overhead on the electron's main thread.

[TheZoq2]

not sure the reason but your request is not a valid json.

Oh yeah, good point. Looks like that was me replacing the \" in my logs with " incorrectly

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"workspace/executeCommand","params":{"command":"tinymist.scrollPreview","arguments":["primary",{"character":0,"event":"panelScrollTo","filepath":"/home/frans/Documents/rust/tinypp/test.typp","line":2}]},"id":"1_scroll"}

is what i'm sending

[tmistele]

Fwiw, here's another workaround. It basically adds tinymist.doStartPreview etc. as commands to a fork of helix. These commands can then be called from the <space>? menu or one can setup some key bindings.

tinymist-helix.mp4