I’m losing my mind over emacs as a python IDE. It seems that no matter which LSP concept I attempt, the experience is suboptimal. At best it is riddled with odd issues, and at worst almost bordering unusable.

I work as a python developer, and I work on quite large code bases. The LSP experience is essential for me given the complexity, but I’m at the point of giving up, even though I’ve been an emacs user for the better part of a decade.

I use doom emacs, by the way, but I’m quite happy to try anything to solve this. I have considered to build an emacs config from scratch again to see if I can narrow down the experience, but right now I have not invested the time. But again, considering how frustrated and desparate I am, everything is on the table.

Let me describe what I need and what I’ve tried.

My requirements

I need my lsp to understand my environment in order to load in a custom PYTHONPATH variable. This I handle with a .envrc file and the emacs module envrc. This has worked without any problems so far.

For the actual LSP, I use python-lsp-server but I am not at all religious about it.

I run mypy on my codebase, and I’d like to use ruff for checking/formating, but I’ve used the other tools (pycodestyle/black) for now.

lsp-mode

The lsp-mode is the one that is closest to being good, had it not been for the abysmal behavior over time. It seems that some memory leaking happens, and over time it becomes sluggish, sometimes blocking emacs for multiple seconds.

eglot

Eglot seems a lot faster, but has functional problems. I’ve often had to restart eglot when opening new python modules. I’ve tried to use eglot for months now, accepting the quirks to gain the speed, but the restart behavior is annoying, and I often get weird errors such as error in process filter: Wrong type argument: plistp, [] repeatedly until I restart eglot again. No luck debugging that error so far either.

I’m also not super excited about the .dir-locals.el approach to customization, but should the other issues resolve, I’m willing to figure that one out.

lsp-bridge

I was quite excited to hear about a third option that was super fast. However, I’ve not manage to get it to work with the envrc package, so I’ve parked that one.

So, I turn to you, kind strangers on the internet. Do you have a well-functioning python LSP setup in emacs? Have you experienced some of the issues that I have described and did you manage to solve it?

Do you perhaps have a described approach to building a great python setup with emacs? Please help me!

  • terminal_prognosis@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Since I work on large Python projects, use direnv to manage my environment, and lsp-mode, I thought I might be able to help, but reading your long message I can’t find any specific issue except it sounds like your LSP server is misbehaving.

    I do not get lagging or memory leaking in Emacs from using it. What process is getting large? Emacs or the LSP server? You don’t give us any clues.

    • dubcroster@alien.top
      OPBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thanks for replying!

      Yeah, I was very loose on details here, and this is probably more because of my frustration than anything.

      I set up my private laptop with Eglot yesterday with a single small python project from scratch and had some of the same issues.

      So I don’t think my issue is so much related to my code base, but more how the default setup for both lsp-mode and eglot is either out of the box with emacs or out of the box with doom emacs.

      If you are indeed finding good success with just lsp-mode and work with large Python projects, that’s extremely valuable for me to hear. It means to me that this is fixable and I should just spend the time.

      • terminal_prognosis@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Though I am therefore no use in solving your problems, if I’ve avoided them. I’m using pyright, and ruff. I am using the lsp-pyright package, and it looks like I configured ruff with:

          (lsp-register-client
   (make-lsp-client
    :new-connection (lsp-stdio-connection (lambda () (list "ruff-lsp")))
    :activation-fn (lsp-activate-on "python")
    :add-on? t
    :server-id 'ruff))