Editor Integration

Most modern text editors support the Language Server Protocol (LSP) and many have support for Swift through SourceKit-LSP. https://www.swift.org/tools has a list of some popular editors and how to set them up. This page covers any editors not listed there.

BBEdit

Support for LSP is built in to BBEdit 14.0 and later.

If sourcekit-lsp is in your $PATH or is discoverable by using xcrun --find sourcekit-lsp, BBEdit will use it automatically. Otherwise you can manually configure BBEdit to use a suitable sourcekit-lsp as needed.

You can read more about BBEdit's LSP support and configuration hints here.

Nova

You can use SourceKit-LSP with Nova by using the Icarus extension.

By default, Icarus will try to discover sourcekit-lsp automatically (using xcrun --find sourcekit-lsp), but can be configured to look at an installed Swift toolchain package (using xcrun --toolchain swift --find sourcekit-lsp) or custom path. To do so, open the extension settings from Nova's Extensions menu: Extension Library… -> Icarus -> Settings -> Toolchain.

The Icarus source is located within its repository.

Sublime Text

Before using SourceKit-LSP with Sublime Text, you will need to install the LSP, LSP-SourceKit and Swift-Next packages from Package Control. Then toggle the server on by typing in command palette LSP: Enable Language Server Globally or LSP: Enable Language Server in Project.

Theia Cloud IDE

You can use SourceKit-LSP with Theia by using the theiaide/theia-swift image. To use the image you need to have Docker installed first.

The following command pulls the image and runs Theia IDE on http://localhost:3000 with the current directory as a workspace.

$ docker run -it -p 3000:3000 -v "$(pwd):/home/project:cached" theiaide/theia-swift:next

You can pass additional arguments to Theia after the image name, for example to enable debugging:

$ docker run -it -p 3000:3000 --expose 9229 -p 9229:9229 -v "$(pwd):/home/project:cached" theiaide/theia-swift:next --inspect=0.0.0.0:9229

Image Variants

theiaide/theia-swift:latest: This image is based on the latest stable released version.
theiaide/theia-swift:next: This image is based on the nightly published version.

The theia-swift-docker source is located at theia-apps.

Other Editors

SourceKit-LSP should work with any editor that supports the Language Server Protocol (LSP). Each editor has its own mechanism for configuring an LSP server, so consult your editor's documentation for the specifics. In general, you can configure your editor to use SourceKit-LSP for Swift, C, C++, Objective-C and Objective-C++ files; the editor will need to be configured to find the sourcekit-lsp executable from your installed Swift toolchain, which expects to communicate with the editor over stdin and stdout.

Building a new SourceKit-LSP Client

If you are building a new SourceKit-LSP client for an editor, here are some critical hints that may help you. Some of these are general hints for development of an LSP client.

SourceKit-LSP has extensive logging. See the Logging section in CONTRIBUTING.md for more information.
You have to open a document before sending document-based requests.
Don't attempt to use Sourcekit-LSP in a sandboxed context:
- As with most developer tooling, SourceKit-LSP relies on other system- and language tools that it would not be allowed to access from within an app sandbox.
Strictly adhere to the format specification of LSP packets, including their header- and content part.
Piece LSP packets together from the stdout data:
- SourceKit-LSP outputs LSP packets to stdout, but: Single chunks of data output do not correspond to single packets. stdout rather delivers a stream of data. You have to buffer that stream in some form and detect individual LSP packets in it.
Provide the current system environment variables to SourceKit-LSP:
- SourceKit-LSP must read some current environment variables of the system, so don't wipe them all out when providing modified or additional variables.

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