VSCode-ish: Jump to Definition of Variable

[curran]

As a user of VZCode, I want to be able to hold CTRL and click on a variable name to jump to the definition of that variable, just like I can in VSCode.

[servesh-chaturvedi]

Hi Curran, really love your work and videos. I wanted to understand if there is any particular reason for preferring codemirror to monaco editor. It closely resembles the VSCode experience and also feature-rich so less things to implement.

[curran]

The main reason is that when I looked into Monaco, it just really felt quite bloated and cumbersome. I had been following CodeMirror 6 developments for some time (see this early piece: CodeMirror 6 Experiments), and am deeply aligned with Marjin's development approach and goals, especially around the plugin architecture and the mobile usability. I've read that Monaco does not work on mobile, which for me is a deal breaker as one of my ultimate goals is to make a code editor that is actually somewhat usable on mobile, for folks who want to learn to code but don't have access to a laptop (like folks in India - there are many people like this).

I also have a history of working with CodeMirror 5 + ShareDB for the real-time integration, and was able to "unlock" that CodeMirror 6 + ShareDB integration successfully, which took a ton of work. So even if Monaco is great, there's the sunk cost of that integration that's already behind me. Doing a similar integration with Monaco + ShareDB seems like a scary huge task that may turn out to be impossible.

This post captures many of the pain points I see with Monaco in general: https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/migrating-monaco-codemirror

Thanks for the question!

[curran]

This is the single most valuable feature of VSCode that I really miss when using VZCode.
We are already using the TypeScript language server, which may have this sort of functionality built in.
Needs some research on existing implementations with CodeMirror 6.
There's a chance someone has already figured this out in the open source world somewhere.

[curran]

In VSCode it's CTRL+Hover, then click which navigates to the definition.

[curran]

This is the API:

https://github.com/typescript-language-server/typescript-language-server/tree/b224b878652438bcdd639137a6b1d1a6630129e4?tab=readme-ov-file#go-to-source-definition