Is it possible to support 'Format Selection' ?

[Octobug]

Feature

Formatting a full document works fine, but format selection seems not supported yet.

BTW, this extension is a great work, many thanks!

[stefanvanburen]

hey @Octobug, thanks for the shout — did not realize this was a built-in keymapping for VS Code. I think this is probably a feature request on bufbuild/buf, as I believe this formatting is LSP range formatting, which isn't implemented by the LSP yet. I'm not sure exactly how feasible it is as generally the buf formatter assumes it's formatting an entire .proto file, but we could look into it.

[Octobug]

@stefanvanburen Thanks for your reply!

Some adaptive works seem needed in vscode ext development:

• https://code.visualstudio.com/api/language-extensions/programmatic-language-features#format-the-selected-lines-in-an-editor

---

I've also observed/tested some behaviors of the vscode-buf ext. This approach, which does not require support from the LSP, might work:

If a full doc looks like this:

syntax = "proto3";

package pkg;

import "pb.proto";

option go_package = "./go_pkg;go_pkg";

// the selection block
message Event {
  pkg.Header header = 1;
  pkg.Event event = 2;
}
// the selection block

// some other definitions ...

Feed LSP the file-level declarations part plus the selection, it could do the formatting well.

[stefanvanburen]

@Octobug yeah, it's certainly possible to implement via the VS Code APIs, but I think we'll look to get it into the Buf Language Server as that's where the current formatting code lives (and affects all editors using the LSP, not just VS Code 😄).

[stefanvanburen]

hey @Octobug, just transferred this issue to bufbuild/buf, since this is really a feature request for the LSP, whose implementation is based here.

I had a couple of commits playing around with range formatting, but I'm not entirely happy with the approach; it requires formatting the entire top-level message/enum/service/etc. under the cursor. I think we could probably do better than that, although I'd also be curious to understand how this works in other LSP servers; it looks like ruff's LSP for python can handle a given set of lines to reformat, and I think that's how we would want this to work here as well?

[Octobug]

it looks like ruff's LSP for python can handle a given set of lines to reformat, and I think that's how we would want this to work here as well?

Hi @stefanvanburen , I don't have any experience in LSP development. 😂 I'm not quite sure what's the best practice in such scenario. (But in my opinion, ruff's behavior seems good enough.