Help needed for setting up to work on the VS Code extension

[hippietrail]

Unlike actual coding I've never had much intuition for settings and configurations and build systems and web-adjacent stuff is worse for me than most other fields. I've actually written my own little VS Code extension before but it's not helping to get me started hacking on the Harper one.

I'm on an M1 Mac and I'm trying to follow the instructions at https://writewithharper.com/docs/contributors/visual-studio-code

I close the editor I use for working on Harper in Rust and open a new one with just the VS Code extension's folder. I open the .ts file and try to run the debugger. Which gets me this dead end that seems to be waiting for something without telling me what:

Screen.Recording.2025-03-27.at.10.20.09.pm.mov

When I first open the extension folder i see this:

Clicking on that I see only this:

[hippietrail]

@mcecode I believe you're the person to ask questions in this realm.

[mcecode]

So now when the extension host opens I get this notification:

That's weird, that means the extension didn't get built.

Probably related to these errors that show up in the terminal?

Were you able to install the extension's dependencies before trying to run the extension host? I think that's what's causing the errors.

[hippietrail]

So now when the extension host opens I get this notification:

That's weird, that means the extension didn't get built.

I might've got so lost and confused that I didn't do cargo build first. Let me check...
I did cargo build --release and it's the same. Do I have to do some different build step to build the extension? Let me go through the docs... Trying just setup...

OK so that does a whole bunch of stuff and end up failing like this:

> [email protected] lint /Users/hippietrail/harper/packages/vscode-plugin
> biome check src

Debugger listening on ws://127.0.0.1:60678/f0a9490e-38c9-4a35-9361-e85c81a1a483
For help, see: https://nodejs.org/en/docs/inspector
Debugger attached.
Checked 0 files in 719µs. No fixes applied.
internalError/io ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

  ✖ No files were processed in the specified paths.
  

Waiting for the debugger to disconnect...
 ELIFECYCLE  Command failed with exit code 1.
Waiting for the debugger to disconnect...
 ELIFECYCLE  Command failed with exit code 1.
Waiting for the debugger to disconnect...
error: Recipe `test-vscode` failed with exit code 1

Probably related to these errors that show up in the terminal?

Were you able to install the extension's dependencies before trying to run the extension host? I think that's what's causing the errors.

By "dependencies" do you mean these?

If so then yes those are all installed.

OK it seems to be working now. Some of my new logic is working. So which steps were essential because I don't yet have an intuition for the workflow.

[mcecode]

OK it seems to be working now. Some of my new logic is working. So which steps were essential because I don't yet have an intuition for the workflow.

I think for the last part, you just missed running pnpm install to install the extension dependencies which just setup does. I'll update the docs (hopefully soon) to reflect the pain points you encountered here and when trying to check #925.

[mcecode]

Mainly, I think you just missed installing the connor4312.esbuild-problem-matchers extension for the esbuild tasks and running pnpm install to install our extension's dependencies. Those should be done before trying to open the extension host.

[hippietrail]

Do you know of any way to install the extension for Windsurf? It uses open-vsx and the extension is not there. The repo doesn't have a .vsix and doesn't seem to have anything to build? I tried copying its full directory from my ~/.vscode/extensions/ to my ~/.windsurf/extensions/ and restarted Windsurf but it behaves exactly like in the pictures up above.

I can work on the extension in VS Code but the dialect indicator location is quite different under Windsurf so I want to build it there where I can see it right in the Extension Host.

[mcecode]

Hi, sorry for the late response. In the extension's repo, you can run npx @vscode/vsce package to package the extension. Then, use --install-extension to install the resulting .vsix. Alternatively, you can probably also make an issue in their repo to ask if they can publish the package in OpenVSX.

[hippietrail]

Hi, sorry for the late response. In the extension's repo, you can run npx @vscode/vsce package to package the extension. Then, use --install-extension to install the resulting .vsix. Alternatively, you can probably also make an issue in their repo to ask if they can publish the package in OpenVSX.

No problem. The repo seemed to be inactive but the npx solution worked perfectly! Thanks for that.

[hippietrail]

This is unexpected... Now that I can run and debug the extension from Windsurf, I tweaked the priority of the dialect icon to the best spot taking into account both editors. But now it won't run from VS Code!

Here's the output from just test-vscode:

Settings Sync: Account status changed from uninitialized to unavailable
** dialect set to American ** American
** dialect set to British ** British
** dialect set to American ** American
..............................


30 specs, 0 failures
Finished in 6.754 seconds
[main 2025-04-07T08:16:00.724Z] Extension host with pid 50410 exited with code: 0, signal: unknown.
(node:50392) [DEP0168] DeprecationWarning: Uncaught N-API callback exception detected, please run node with option --force-node-api-uncaught-exceptions-policy=true to handle those exceptions properly.
Exit code:   0

I noticed a VS Code update came in since I last used it. That's one potential cause?

---

Windsurf's LLM helped me tweak the justfile for node debugging and it now ends like this:

30 specs, 0 failures
Finished in 6.711 seconds
[main 2025-04-07T08:29:55.236Z] Extension host with pid 52702 exited with code: 0, signal: unknown.
[main 2025-04-07T08:29:55.282Z] [uncaught exception in main]: TypeError: Cannot convert undefined or null to object
[main 2025-04-07T08:29:55.282Z] TypeError: Cannot convert undefined or null to object
    at Function.keys (<anonymous>)
    at kc.s (file:///Users/hippietrail/harper/packages/vscode-plugin/.vscode-test/vscode-darwin-arm64-1.99.0/Visual%20Studio%20Code.app/Contents/Resources/app/out/main.js:113:30032)
    at Object.<anonymous> (file:///Users/hippietrail/harper/packages/vscode-plugin/.vscode-test/vscode-darwin-arm64-1.99.0/Visual%20Studio%20Code.app/Contents/Resources/app/out/main.js:113:29714)
Exit code:   0

---

I made this draft PR but don't trust I fixed everything due to taking LLM advice without grokking everything: #1042