Add Markdown LSP via Marksman

[artempyanykh]

Marksman is an LSP server for Markdown: https://github.com/artempyanykh/marksman
It supports a bunch of LSP features: symbols, references, rename, diag, etc. and already has integrations with emacs, neovim, and vscode. I think it can be a good addition to Helix.

Context:
I'm the author of Marksman. I've recently got a bug-report from a user that Marksman doesn't work with Helix. I haven't heard about Helix before, but it looked like an awesome project, so I fixed a couple things and now the latest release of Marksman seems to work pretty well with Helix.

[CptPotato]

Thanks for the addition 👍

I was only able to get the LSP to work by creating an empty .marksman.toml file in my folder. Is it possible to use the language server for just a single .md file/directory or is the .marksman.toml configuration always required?

Edit: Ah, I should have paid more attention to the readme, towards the end it states that a single file mode is not implemented yet. It also mentions that a VCS root can be used as root folder which also works on my side.

[artempyanykh]

@CptPotato yeah. The single-file mode is not a part of the LSP spec; and although I can probably come up with my own special mode that would restrict language feature to a single file only, there’s a lot of interactions with the rest of the spec to get right so it won’t be an hour of work. Besides there wasn’t really much demand for it yet, so 🤷‍♂️

[David-Else]

Marksman looks amazing, but we would benefit from a discussion if it is 'better' than the new:

https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2022/08/16/markdown-language-server
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-markdown-languageservice

from VS Code to be the default.

I have not tried either yet. Marksman has the advantage of being in a compiled language, but anything from VS Code has massive potential for support and maintenance.

There was also talk of using ltex-ls #2182 , but that might be better as an addition when we can run two language servers at once?

[artempyanykh]

@David-Else fair question! If somebody wants to drive this discussion I'd be happy to contribute, but I don't have time to do the deep dive myself.

On the surface the feature list looks similar with the delta being:

• on marksman's side there's full support for wiki-links and a TOC code action
• VSCode's LS supports completion for images, config to enable/disable certain diagnostics, and folding ranges (which is cool, I need to add it too 🙂)

In terms of maintenance it looks like it's mainly a couple dudes working on VSCode's markdown LS, and 1 + ε :) dudes on Marksman. But I can't really comment on the potential. So far, the only hard evidence about support and maintenance is that 1 Helix-specific bug reported to Marksman was resolved within a day 😉

Fee free to take it from here.

[CptPotato]

It's not for me to decide but I prefer the smaller dependency of marksman over requiring a node installation to run the VSCode language server on top of.

Then again, switching between LSPs seems simple, so regardless of which one ends up being the default I can just use the one I prefer either way.

[David-Else]

I have been trying out Marksman, the wiki-links are fantastic and make markdown even more useful! Performance seems great, I see no reason not to make it the official Helix Markdown server... apart from the one bug I found and reported, but that might just be a Neovim problem artempyanykh/marksman#52

[artempyanykh]

Thanks @David-Else, appreciate the kind words 💖 The bug you mentioned is really an oversight and should be easily fixable. Thanks for reporting!

[artempyanykh]

FYI, the original problem mentioned by @David-Else (artempyanykh/marksman#52) was resolved, the fix's in master and in a couple days will be in a public release.

[artempyanykh]

@CptPotato FYI I added a single-file mode to Marksman (cf. artempyanykh/marksman#69)

[David-Else]

@the-mikedavis What do you think? Marksman seems perfect, even works with the symbol picker now:

I think ltex-ls is also essential, but that is more for spell checking than actual Markdown navigation and linting like Marksman. Waiting for multiple language servers to be merged.

[the-mikedavis]

I gave it a try and I think marksman is a good choice 👍

Thanks for opening this @artempyanykh! Can you give this a rebase to fix the conflicts?

(I made a flake if Nix users are looking to try it out: https://github.com/the-mikedavis/marksman/tree/flake)

[artempyanykh]

Thanks @the-mikedavis! Yeah, I'll rebase and push the new version. And thanks for the Nix flake 👍 There was one person asking about nix integration; perhaps this will help them.

[artempyanykh]

@the-mikedavis rebased and pushed.

[the-mikedavis]

Thanks!