nvim-metals

This is a WIP Metals plugin and guide for Nvim users utilizing the Nvim built-in LSP module. The goal of this plugin is to provide with the extra functionality that you need for Metals and the rest will serve as a guide and an example.

Keep in mind that the level of support is rapidly changing, there are bugs, and there are missing features. Some of this is changing daily, so expect stuff to break without warning or change.

If you're first getting starting with Metals, consider using coc-metals if you're looking for a more feature-full and stable Metals + Nvim experience.

If you're a coc-metals user and want to try this but are worried about coc.nvim and the built-in LSP conflicting in any way, take a look at how I handle this in the wiki

Prerequisites
- Plugins
Getting Started
Settings and Mappings
- Custom Mappings
Available Commands
Custom Functions
Custom Callbacks
Statusline Integration
Complementary Plugins
- Completions
- Diagnostics
Importing Your Build
Known Limitations
Troubleshooting

Prerequisites

Before you get started you need to ensure that you have the nightly/development build of Nvim. LSP support hasn't landed in stable yet. You can find instructions for how to do this for you OS here. It's best to re-build often as LSP support is changing daily. The easiest way to ensure you're on nightly is to to do a nvim --version. If you see anything v0.4.x then it didn't work. You're looking for v0.5.x:

❯ nvim --version
NVIM v0.5.0-3de9452
...

Plugins

Apart from this plugin, you'll also want to have the neovim/nvim-lsp plugin installed. For now, this plugin offers automated installation and some default configurations for Metals.

Use whichever plugin manager to install both. vim-plug is probably the most common, so I'll use that as an example:

call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')
  " Main necessary plugins
  Plug 'neovim/nvim-lsp'
  Plug 'scalameta/nvim-metals'
  " Complementary plugins that I recommend and will go over down below
  Plug 'haorenW1025/completion-nvim'
  Plug 'haorenW1025/diagnostic-nvim'
call plug#end()

Getting started

First things first, you need to install Metals. This functionality is provided by the nvim-lsp plugin. It offers automated installation of servers and basic configurations so you don't have to do it manually.

If you'd like to use a Snapshot version of metals, you can set it like below before you do the LspInstall. If you've already installed, you need to remove the installation, set this, and then install again. Hopefully this process will be smoother in the future.

let g:metals_server_version = '0.8.4+106-5f2b9350-SNAPSHOT'

:LspInstall metals

There isn't a lot of feedback on whether or not this worked, so after you do this, issue the following command to ensure that it's installed. This will also show you the directory that it's installed in.

:LspInstallInfo

If it's installed, you should see something like the following:

{
  metals = {
    cmd = { "/Users/ckipp/.cache/nvim/nvim_lsp/metals/metals" },
    install_dir = "/Users/ckipp/.cache/nvim/nvim_lsp/metals",
    is_installed = "file"
  }
}

Make sure to take a look at the setup() function which will show you how to override certain values or add extra settings. You can see all of the default Metals values in the readme or checkout nvim-lsp/lua/nvim_lsp/metals.lua.

If you don't want any of the extra stuff the other plugins offer, then just copy the mappings under the nvim-lsp Mappings section to get the mappings, add in the autocmd to get you completions (that you'll need to trigger yourself without the plugin). Then you can just use the default setup like below which uses all defaults:

require'nvim_lsp'.metals.setup{}

However, I recommend that you use a few related plugins for a much better experience. If you're using extra nvim lsp plugins, they should have good instructions, but you'd set them up like the following:

:lua << EOF
  local nvim_lsp = require'nvim_lsp'
  local M = {}
  M.on_attach = function()
      require'diagnostic'.on_attach() -- needed for the diagnostic plugin
      require'completion'.on_attach() -- needed for the completion plugin
    end
  nvim_lsp.metals.setup{
    on_attach = M.on_attach
  }
EOF

Fair warning, they installation is probably all going to change. In you following the conversation here, you'll notice a couple things.

There is an automated way to install, but not uninstall or update
The install feature will probably go away

For now, this is still the best way to install Metals for Nvim. If the Install goes away, there is a decent chance I'll handle the Install / Uninstall / Update right in this plugin.

Settings and Mappings

Some very basic things are enabled by default, like in-line diagnostics, but you'll want a basic configuration for things like finding definitions and references. The nvim-lsp.vim file has examples of these along with some settings for the other complementary plugins. These are opinionated, and catered to my work flow. There are also a two other plugin settings under completion-nvim and diagnostic-nvim headings. Those plugins, which are outlined below must also be installed for those settings to work. The idea of me including this file is for you to use them as a base or an example and to then build off of them or change them to your liking. They also serve as an example of how to use lua in your configuration if you're not familiar with them. They also have a few vim configurations that I'd argue are important for you to not go insane (like having set signcolumn=yes). Again, edit this to your liking. They are just in here as an example.

nnoremap <silent> gd <cmd>lua vim.lsp.buf.definition()<CR>
nnoremap <silent> K  <cmd>lua vim.lsp.buf.hover()<CR>

You can sort of assume what many of the mappings do, but you can find more info on the available options by doing :h lsp-config. There is a lot of great info in the lsp section of the docs, but also keep in mind that things are often changing and many sections are just bare with TODOs.

The mappings I've included are a combination of what Metals supports and also what Nvim LSP supports.

Custom Mappings

If you'd like to add a custom mapping instead of using the commands, you're free to do so. For example, let's say we wanted to add a custom mapping for BuildImport, you could by doing the following:

nnoremap <silent> <leader>bi  <cmd>lua require'metals'.build_import()<CR>

This would allow you to do <leader>bi to trigger an import, the same way :BuildImport does.

Available Commands

Currently, the following commands are available:

Command	Description
`:BuildImport`	Import the build
`:BuildConnect`	Manually connect to the build server
`:BuildRestart`	Restart the build server
`:CompileCascade`	Compile current open file along with all build targets that depend on it
`:Format`	Format current buffer Make sure to have a .scalafmt.conf
`:MetalsDoctor`	Run Metals Doctor, which will open in your browser
`:MetalsLogsToggle`	Opens the embedded terminal to view metals logs
`:SourcesScan`	Scan all workspace sources
`:NewScalaFile`	Create a new Scala file

Custom Functions

Custom functions are similar to Custom Callbacks in that you use them to override a default setup option for Metals.

Currently if you use a build definition structure with multiple nested build files, the Nvim LSP client will re-initialize when you go into a module with another build file. In order to prevent this, use the metals.root_pattern() function to override the root_dir function like below:

local metals = require'metals'
nvim_lsp.metals.setup{
  root_dir = metals.root_pattern("build.sbt", "build.sc");
}

This root_pattern() function is almost identical to the one that is in nvim-lsp, but it adds in the ability to check to ensure that there isn't another build file in the parent directory. If you are only using nvim-metals with projects that only ever have one build file, then there is no need to set this.

Custom Callbacks

The Nvim LSP module heavily relies on callback for each type of message that it receives from the server. These can all be overridden and customized. You can either override them globally, or just for Metals. An example of global override using one of the custom callbacks nvim-metals provides would look like this:

local metals = require'metals'
lsp.callbacks['textDocument/hover'] = metals['textDocument/hover']

Example usage for only Metals:

local metals = require'metals'
nvim_lsp.metals.setup{
  callbacks = {
    ['textDocument/hover'] = metals['textDocument/hover']
  }
}

Currently, nvim-metals has the following callbacks that you can use:

Callback	Description
metals['textDocument/hover']	The default floating window for hovers do not wrap for long text. This hover implementation will wrap for you.
metals['metals/status']	Used as a callback to enable `metals/status`. In order to use this, you need to make sure you also override `statusBarProvider` to `on` in your `init_options`.
metals['metals/inputBox']	Used to provide handling for `metals/inputBox` Needed for the `:NewScalaFile` command
metals['metals/quickPick']	Used to provide handling for `metals/quickPick` Needed for `:NewScalaFile` command
metals['metals/executeClientCommand']	Used to provide handling for `metals/exeexecuteClientCommand` Needed for the `:NewScalaFile` command

Statusline integration

nvim-metals provides a few functions that can be used in your statusline in order to show Errors, Warnings, and Metals status. For diagnostics you can use them like below:

...
set statusline+=%{metals#errors()}
set statusline+=%{metals#warnings()}
...

The colors are using a custom highlighting group that you'd need to define or assign yourself.

You can also enable metals/status which will allow for you to use the metals#status() function in your statusline to show the status messages coming from Metals. This can be used like the below example or added into an existing statusline integration:

...
set statusline+=%{metals#status()}
...

Complementary Plugins

I've listed two external plugins in the examples that help the diagnostic and completion experience. The Nvim LSP integration exposes a bunch of callbacks that allow for easy customization. As far as I know the idea isn't to make an extremely polished experience out of the box with Nvim LSP, but rather offer a solid core that allows you to define custom callbacks for how you want to handle these things. The idea is that this plugin will offer you all the necessary Metals specific settings, while also allowing other plugins to offer the thing they do best. This follows the Unix philosophy of tools doing one thing, doing them well, and interfacing well with others.

Completions

Taken from the docs:

Nvim provides the vim.lsp.omnifunc 'omnifunc' handler which allows i_CTRL-X_CTRL-O to consume LSP completion. Example config (note the use of v:lua to call Lua from Vimscript):

" Use LSP omni-completion in Scala files.
autocmd Filetype scala setlocal omnifunc=v:lua.vim.lsp.omnifunc

This will give you completion in Scala files, but you'd need to trigger them using i_CTRL-X_CTRL-O, which you may not want. This is why I include the following plugin:

completion-nvim

Plug 'haorenW1025/completion-nvim'

This plugin will give you completion automatically in the floating window as your typing. I have a few other settings listed which allow you to use <Tab> to navigate the popup menu.

Diagnostics

The diagnostics plugin I include mainly allows for easy settings and customization for how your diagnostics are displayed. For example you can delay the syntactic diagnostics that Metals provides while typing when you're in insert mode. You can choose to display them as virtual text or not. Read through the docs to get an idea of all the options.

diagnostic-nvim

Plug 'haorenW1025/diagnostic-nvim'

Keep in mind that both of these plugins are under active development as well and things are likely to change.

Importing your build

You need to do this before any Metals functionality will work

Since window/showMessageRequest is not yet supported in the nvim LSP module, you need to trigger this manually. As you would normally, open your project and then issue a :BuildImport command which will send the request to Metals to import your build.

Known limitations

There is no window/showMessageRequest so you'll never get prompted to import your build. Another issue is that if you do a :Format request and don't have a .scalafmt.conf file, it will error out. There is an issue for this here: neovim/neovim#11710
Multiline textEdits aren't being applied correctly. You can track this issue here: neovim/neovim#12195
The Quickfix List opens at times in an odd position (to the bottom right of your viewport). You can follow a feature request to discuss this here: neovim/neovim#12241
additionalTextEdits are not taken into account in CompletionItem. In Metals this means things like the s getting added in front of a string during a completion to make it an interpolated string won't work as expected. You can follow this issue here: neovim/neovim#12310 However, if you're using the nvim-completion plugin, this does take additionalTextEdits into account for completion items

Troubleshooting

If you're using the built-in LSP support you may have to do a bit of troubleshooting. It may not always be easy to tell if the issue is coming from missing LSP support or misconfiguration between Metals and Nvim. Here are a couple pointers on tracking down the issue.

Use :MetalsLogsToggle which will open the embedded Nvim terminal tailing the .metals/metals.log file. Take a look in there for something odd. More than likely if something isn't working, it will have blown up and you'll see a hint here.
If you see an error flash in your terminal and you want to see what it was, :messages is your friend to find it.
Read through the Known Limitation again to make sure it's not something that is documented not working.
If you really want to get deep into debugging, create a JSON-RPC trace file and then you can tail the communication between the Nvim LSP client the Metals server.
When in doubt, just submit and issue, and we'll dive in together.

timokau / nvim-metals