Plans to add CodeLens support?

[weilbith]

Hey 👋🏾

The title basically states it already. It think it could be pretty interesting to allow injection code lenses like for version control, testing, references etc pp.

What do you think? How hard is to add support for it?

[jose-elias-alvarez]

I don't know much about CodeLens, but in theory: if Neovim supports it, adding support here shouldn't be too challenging. For reference, #301 is the PR that added support for completion. That was 272 lines, including documentation, tests, and two sample sources, so the core scaffolding shouldn't be too hard to set up. Happy to review / provide guidance on a PR if anyone is interested.

[danielo515]

I am confused. Aren't code actions essentially the same as code lens? Can you explain how it is different?

[weilbith]

TL;DR: They are a combination of inlay hints combined with code actions.

Haha. Yes, they are very closely related. But not the same, else the specification wouldn't define them.
I think you can describe code lenses best as visual code-actions. While code action can be quite complex and a mass of them are possible to execute for every single character/location- in the whole file, include refactoring, work on individual visual selections and more, code lenses are more... cautious selected.
First and for most do users do not ask for code actions at the current location or the current selection, but rather the "server" is suggesting certain stuff as virtual text. In most cases it is a combination of visual helpful hints that provide additional information or actions on execution. This is especially helpful for more cursor focused editors like VSCode, but can be still helpful for more keyboard focused setups.
An example would to not only have an action to execute a test in debug mode, but a code lens that shows that this gets recognized as a test, shows the result (positiv, negativ, not executed) of the last run etc. So you have this piece of information displayed and it allows for further actions like executing the test or showing the output of the test.
This gets also used a lot for how many references to this function exist and to display them. Or if there are open pull requests on GitHub that target this piece of code too. The code coverage or complexity.

It is a bunch inlay hints for selected locations (often related to functions and classes) and also provide an action.

PS:
This would look best with the open PR to allow visual text in NeoVim anywhere. E.g. VSCode inserts a virtual line above a function to provide code lenses for this function.

[weilbith]

You can easily argue if you like this or that code lens and what is actually useful. But I guess that is the case for many things.
I think it will be easy enough to add code lens support here. I'm just researching for the implementation of some sources right now and try to find time.