Perl Language Server

Lightning-fast Perl language support with 26+ IDE features powered by perl-lsp.

✨ Features

🎯 Core Intelligence

Go to Definition - Jump to any symbol declaration
Find References - Find all usages across your project
Hover Documentation - Instant docs for functions and variables
Auto-completion - Smart suggestions for variables, functions, modules
Signature Help - Real-time parameter hints while typing
Symbol Navigation - Outline view and breadcrumbs

🔧 Refactoring & Code Actions

Rename - Safe renaming across files
Extract Variable - Pull out expressions into variables
Extract Subroutine - Create functions from code blocks
Convert Loops - Transform between for/while/foreach
Add Error Checking - Insert error handling automatically
Organize Imports - Sort and clean use statements

📊 Advanced Features

Semantic Highlighting - Context-aware syntax coloring
Type Hierarchy - Navigate inheritance with @ISA
Call Hierarchy - Trace function calls up and down
CodeLens - Inline reference counts
Inlay Hints - Type annotations in editor
Document Highlights - Highlight symbol occurrences

🐛 Diagnostics & Quality

Real-time Errors - Syntax and semantic error detection
Undefined Variables - Catch typos under use strict
Unused Variables - Find dead code
Missing Pragmas - Suggest strict/warnings
Code Folding - Collapse code blocks
Format on Type - Auto-formatting as you code

🚀 Performance

1-150μs typical parse times
<50ms response time for all operations
100% Perl 5 coverage including edge cases
Sub-millisecond position conversions (v0.8.0)

📦 Installation

Install from the Visual Studio Marketplace.

The extension automatically downloads the correct language server for your platform:

Windows (x64, ARM64)
macOS (Intel, Apple Silicon)
Linux (x64, ARM64)

Manual installation options:

# Homebrew (macOS/Linux)
brew tap tree-sitter-perl/tap
brew install perl-lsp

# One-liner (Linux/macOS)
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EffortlessMetrics/perl-lsp/master/install.sh | bash

# From source
cargo install --git https://github.com/EffortlessMetrics/perl-lsp --bin perl-lsp

⚙️ Configuration

{
  // Auto-download server if not found
  "perl-lsp.autoDownload": true,

  // Custom server path (optional)
  "perl-lsp.serverPath": "/usr/local/bin/perl-lsp",

  // Enable real-time syntax diagnostics
  "perl-lsp.enableDiagnostics": true,

  // Enable semantic syntax highlighting
  "perl-lsp.enableSemanticTokens": true,

  // Enable document formatting (requires perltidy)
  "perl-lsp.enableFormatting": true,

  // Additional library include paths
  "perl-lsp.includePaths": ["lib", "local/lib/perl5"],

  // LSP trace level for debugging
  "perl-lsp.trace.server": "off"
}

🎯 Supported Perl Features

Modern Perl (5.38+)

class/method/field keywords
try/catch/finally blocks
defer blocks
Subroutine signatures
Type constraints

Complete Syntax Support

Regular expressions with any delimiter (m!pattern!, s{}{})
Heredocs (all variants including indented)
Unicode identifiers (my $café = 'coffee')
Postfix dereferencing ($ref->@*)
Smart match operator (~~)
Indirect object syntax

Built-in Functions

Complete signatures for 150+ Perl built-ins with parameter documentation.

🤝 Compatibility

Works with any LSP-compatible editor:

Visual Studio Code
VSCodium
Cursor
Gitpod
GitHub Codespaces
Neovim (via nvim-lspconfig)
Emacs (via lsp-mode)

perl-lsp-rs

EffortlessMetrics