--- title: "Kate LSP Status - July 22" date: 2019-07-22T22:43:00+02:00 draft: false categories: [kde, kate, development] tags: [kde, kate] --- After my series of LSP client posts, I got the question: What does this actually do? And why should I like this or help with it? For the basic question: What the heck is the [Language Server Protocol (LSP)](https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/overview), I think my [first post](/posts/kate-language-server-protocol-client/) can help. Or, for more details, just head over to the [official what/why/... page](https://langserver.org/). But easier than to describe why it is nice, I can just show the stuff in action. Below is a video that shows the features that at the moment work with our master branch. It is shown using the build directory of Kate itself. To get a usable build directory, I build my stuff locally with [kdesrc-build](https://kdesrc-build.kde.org/), the only extra config I have in the global section of my **.kdesrc-buildrc** is: > cmake-options -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -G "Kate - Unix Makefiles" -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON This will auto generate the needed **.kateproject** files for the Kate project plugin and the **compile_commands.json** for **clangd** (the LSP server for C/C++ the plugin uses). If you manually build your stuff with **cmake**, you can just add the > -G "Kate - Unix Makefiles" -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON parts to your **cmake** call. If you use **ninja** and not **make**, just use > -G "Kate - Ninja" -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON Then, let's see what you can do, once you are in a prepared build directory and have a **master** version of **Kate** in your **PATH**.
I hope the quality is acceptable, that is my first try in a long time to do some screen-cast ;) As you can see, this is already in an usable state at least for C/C++ in combination with **clangd**. For details how to build Kate master with it's plugins, please take a look at [this guide](https://kate-editor.org/build-it/). If you want to start to hack on the plugin, you find it in the kate.git, [addons/lspclient](https://cgit.kde.org/kate.git/tree/addons/lspclient). Feel welcome to show up on [kwrite-devel@kde.org](mailto:kwrite-devel@kde.org) and help out! All development discussions regarding this plugin happen there. If you are already familiar with Phabricator, post some patch directly at [KDE's Phabricator instance](https://phabricator.kde.org/differential/).