Bogus workspaceFolders when initializing an LSP server

[artempyanykh]

Summary

See this comment (and related user bug report) for more information.

TL;DR: something recently between 66276ce..ce469ab in Helix such that when helix opens a file which is outside of VSC or any of the roots for the language, the LSP server (Marksman in this example) is initialized with a workspaceFolder equal to cwd.

Workspace folder is used as a project root and a root folder from which an LSP server would hydrate its state which usually means reading a bunch of files in the folder's file tree. When the workspace folder is just cwd, this doesn't make sense.

Of course, I can add some extra logic in Marksman to detect whether it's init inside a project to avoid the file tree scan. But so far, no other editor does what helix does.

Reproduction Steps

See this for repro instructions.

Helix log

No response

Platform

macOS

Terminal Emulator

iTerm2

Helix Version

22.08.1-334-gce469abf

[the-mikedavis]

Currently if we can't determine a good workspace root we fall back to the CWD and that value gets plugged in to the workspaceFolders value in the initialization params. What would be the preferred behavior in this case? Giving null, [], or defaulting to another location?

[artempyanykh]

Both null and [] would work, although null might be a bit more idiomatic as per the LSP doc:

/// ...
/// It can be `null` if the client supports workspace folders but none are configured.
workspaceFolders?: WorkspaceFolder[] | null

The problem with random values in workspaceFolders is that the server can't tell if this is a genuine project or not without doing project-detection logic on its own (that may differ between editors).

Having null for workspaceFolders is fine because when the server gets textDocument/didOpen it'll check the lack of a folder and may enter a single-file mode (if the server supports it) or just do nothing but gracefully :)