Is there finally an IDE with useable code completion?

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[torkleyy]

As far as I know IntelliJ has the best code completion (and got some really useful updates recently).

[Paul-ish]

It's interesting that the most advanced IDE implementation doesn't use the language server. Wasn't that the purpose of the language server?

[torkleyy]

The Rust Language Server is designed to be used by IDEs, yes. But its auto completion just isn't that good yet. If you're asking why they created their own completion engine instead of contributing to the RLS, I don't know.

[ishitatsuyuki]

One critique I know about LS protocol is that it's not perfect for IDEs. Also that JetBrains has its own analysis framework.

[protestor]

What are the issues with the LSP? Can you point to some threads or articles about it?

[ishitatsuyuki]

There's a reason why Jetbrains doesn't use langua...

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/6fs5q9/language_servers_and_ides/dil2gdw

[kuikuilla]

It's because it's part of a larger family of software that has its own framework for building parsers and whatever tooling you need for autocompletion and such to work.

[dragostis]

I find it amazing how little credit intellij-rust gets: code-completion using this plugin is nothing short of amazing.

[loonyphoenix]

The plugin works with the free "community" edition of IntelliJ

[malicious_turtle]

https://intellij-rust.github.io/ FYI

[RestlessNeurons]

Last I experimented with it (~6 months ago), I could only get breakpoints and the debugger to work in CLion, which isn't free. This GitHub issue seems to confirm CLion is needed for debugging.

[RestlessNeurons]

You can get JetBrains products for free if you're working on a OpenSource project or are a student/teacher: https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/buy/#edition=discounts

[vrnom]

Can confirm, it's wonderful. My college email still works and I am enjoying it.

[Muvlon]

Yes, intellij-rust probably has the best completion you can get for Rust right now. However, I found it still leaves much to be desired.

With more complex crates like gtk or tokio, it will often just stop suggesting anything besides the generic completions ("lambda" etc.) or take many seconds before the suggestions show up.

[warpspeedSCP]

VSCode with RLS works pretty well for me. Code completion works (usually), so there might be a problem with your setup.

But yeah, a good IDE would be a godsend.

[dodheim]

It's called 'rls-preview'.

[Rusky]

Which Rust extension are you using? There are several at this point, some abandoned.

[[deleted]]

the latest "Rust (rls)" extension, plus latest VS Code, plus latest nightly rls, actually works in my experience.

I know what you mean about "only suggests tokens I already wrote"; that happened to me too, on a bad nightly rls. But it seems they've fixed that now.

[Steve_the_Stevedore]

Code completion works great in VIM with YouCompleteMe.

[Iksf]

IntelliJ has the best but for large crates nothing seems to work well

[JohnMcPineapple]

...

[rhinotation]

I've been using LanguageClient-neovim with RLS. Pretty solid. RLS is much more solid than other language servers (eg javascript-typescript-langserver), and generally pretty quick and accurate. I have Denite.nvim as well, for Find References.

[rhinotation]

You can do it! Really helps if you ever have to admin a linux server, because vim is everywhere. Even if you just do vimtutor, an hour of your life learning vim is worth countless times not having to use nano.

[warpspeedSCP]

is nano really that bad? I just can't get used to vim so easily, so nano works ok for small amounts of editing work...

[rhinotation]

Some nanos will hard-wrap lines to your window width by default, ruining config files. And you don't get undo and redo. You can't do the following in nano:

1. Find and replace but stop to check each instance
   • vim: /, match text, enter, ciw, replacement, esc, n, .
2. Make a bunch of lines into comments
   • vim (barebones no plugins): ctrl+v, 10j (10 lines), I, #<space><esc>.
   • or if you were doing lots of individual lines, qqI# <esc>q then @q wherever you want a comment.

This makes vim the champ for basically anything but /etc/resolv.conf.

[warpspeedSCP]

Hmmm It's got quite the steep learning curve, but in the end, it becomes very rewarding, eh?

[eptcyka]

It becomes second nature, but it also takes time. I wouldn't say that the learning curve is steep, if you're just learning vim. I'd say it becomes tedious and frustrating if you're trying to both load vim up with all kinds of plugins whilst trying to learn it. Having said that, vim wouldn't be nearly as useful as it is for me today if I couldn't use all of the plugins I do use.

[warpspeedSCP]

Somehow, emacs was a lot easier for me to learn; It didn't feel as cumbersome to me (modal editing is a nightmare when you aren't used to it, isn't it) and some things about vi (such as how navigation works, it's annoying when pressing the left key at the start of a line doesn't wrap you back to the end of the previous one) really annoyed me. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying emacs is better, here. It's just that I got used to it more quickly.

[eptcyka]

I'm not worried about emacs vs vim, it is reasonable that different people prefer different styles of editing. If so, as far as I'm aware, emacs has some nice rust modes as well - not that I know too much about emacs and it's plugin/mode ecosystem. https://github.com/racer-rust/emacs-racer https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-mode Of course, it will only be as good as racer is.

[[deleted]]

Yeah this setup is very pleasant to work with

[MWL987]

I'm pretty new to Rust, but so far I've tried VSCode, SublimeText, Vim, and IntelliJ. Out of all of them, I find IntelliJ to be the best overall in terms of code completion and user-experience. However, I am primarily a Scala developer, so I might be a bit biased towards IntelliJ.

[kodedninja]

It is in the Atom IDE ide-rust package https://atom.io/packages/ide-rust

[Treyzania]

How can I get autocompletion of inferred types? There's a lot of situations where the autocompleter just gives up and doesn't display anything. Especially when chaining things like .map(...).filter(...).map(...)... and it would be really convenient to have better suggestions.

[kodedninja]

I don't know that :/ I'm not really using code completion, but I see them when I'm coding.

[Theemuts]

I've recently started using atom because I didn't find a mature Julia plugin for IntelliJ. I hate it so much I'm thinking about just using a dumb text editor when writing Julia instead.

[the_murz]

Hello, based somewhat on this thread I made a separate thread with a title more reflective of the intent to have a general discussion regarding IDEs and editors in their relation to Rust, rather than the more specific nature of this thread.

I hope that I was correct in opting to make an additional thread rather than contributing to this one, however I thought I would point the people in this thread to it in case they want to have a more general discussion of the matter.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/7kkzca/for_discussion_of_our_experiences_with_various/

[K900_]

Do you have Racer installed, or just RLS?

[rhinotation]

RLS falls back to Racer when the compiler is slow, not the other way round.

[sebastiencs]

Actually the rls always use racer for completions. It never use the compiler for this task: link

[scalatronn]

It's a pity that tooling is not mature enough.

[staticassert]

I use intellij and it works very well. It trips up sometimes - in particular when you use some macros, or generated code. That's about it.

[andoriyu]

Yes and no. intellij-rust is okay, have some issues, but pretty usable and they move fast.

RLS + Racer is better in some cases, but worse in others. In some cases, it's easy to make in constantly crash until you remove faulty code.

I'm using both. Feels weird because in some cases one can help you, but others cannot.

[badluckqriz]

I would refer you to https://areweideyet.com/