Improve the message when commands are run and extension not yet activated

[strowk]

Describe the bug

Import of maven project does not work
To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Open project with pom.xml
2. Run command 'Metals: Import build'
3. Error is displayed:

Command 'Metals: Import build' resulted in an error (command 'metals.build-import' not found)

Expected behavior

No errors

Screenshots

Installation:

• Operating system: Windows
• Editor: Visual Studio Code
• Metals version: v1.9.1

Additional context
It's first time I'm running that extension in VSCode

Search terms

[tgodzik]

Thanks for reporting. That usually means that the plugin was not yet activated. It should activate once you open a Scala file or a workspace with a standard Scala directory structure.

[tgodzik]

Did you manage to activate the extension? I see that you opened another issue, where you progressed further.

[strowk]

Even after I progressed further, that error sometimes happens. I think that it may be happening only short time after start of vscode

[tgodzik]

That's an expected behaviour, because most commands are only available after the language server is fully started. And it can take some seconds to start it up properly.

[strowk]

Could it then give more convenient message? Something like "Wait for Metals language server to start"?

It's quite more time than seconds, by the way, I think a few minutes at least, but probably because my machine is not very fast

[tgodzik]

Could it then give more convenient message? Something like "Wait for Metals language server to start"?

It's quite more time than seconds, by the way, I think a few minutes at least, but probably because my machine is not very fast

That should not be minutes ever, it means that starting a single java process is taking minutes on your machine, which makes it almost unusable 🤔

I have never really seen a situation like that, is there anything in the logs? Is there are message in the bottom saying "Starting Metals server" ?

[strowk]

Ah, sorry for late response. It starts so slowly, because we have mcafee here and it takes really long time to inspect every process that's being run when vscode starts (which's a bunch of language servers), that's why metals starts some time after vscode already started.
Yes, there's a message at the bottom and I also see how antivirus eats cpu :)

It's not so unusable, once all executables are inspected, it runs as normal, but in between some of the extensions behave erratically, including metals

[tgodzik]

Thanks for the explanation. This can be improved inside the VS Code plugin - I will move it here. The issue has a lower priority though, so we would be happy to accept any contributions since I don't think we will be able to work on it soon.