Code completion optimization in VSCode for Framework

[habemus-papadum]

Hi -- (Observable Framework is great! thank you!)

I use vscode to build observable framework solutions, and am finding the degradation in code completion in Markdown compared to baseline / traditional vanilla js challenging. At a high level, I think there are two failure modes:

• Lack of completions in "```js" code blocks and interpolated javascript e.g. ${foo.bar()} in Markdown .
  • my concrete question is for someone who understands how javascript support is implemented in vscode: does that support allow extension points that would enable javascript completion inside of observable markdown code blocks? (and also resolution of observable specific import syntax)
• Github copilot completions include spurious punctuation related to code fencing (so for instance the suggested javascript is good, but the completion almost always includes redundant code fence punctuation that needs to be deleted.)

I am trying to understand if there are people thinking about these topics, what are the best ways to improve the current IDE code completion experience, and how complicated / feasible is it to use hooks in vscode or github copilot to get a better experience with observable.

If there are small concrete tasks that can be done in this space, I'm happy to have a go.

Thanks, nehal

[mythmon]

I think that to get support for VSCode to understand Observable Markdown, you'd have to implement a new language extension for VSCode. It might be able to re-use the existing JS language as an embedded language, though some features of Framework would require tighter integration. The documentation for writing VSCode language extensions is here: https://code.visualstudio.com/api/language-extensions/overview. Unfortunately, although this is concrete, I don't think it is a small undertaking.

Regarding Copilot, I think that would be up to GitHub or the owners of the LLMs that Copilot uses. I don't think there is a way to alter the prompts that Copilot uses while handling code completion to give it hints like not wanting the start of a new js block.