Is process_items a good place to format completion item text in the popup menu?

[alikhan-ab]

Contributing guidelines

• I have read CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

Module(s)

mini.completion

Question

I want to truncate long labels for completion items provided by one of my language servers. I currently do this by truncating the labels inside the process_items function. Does anyone think this the correct place to handle this?

One drawback I see is that this would apply to all language servers. And according to the LSP specification, the completion item’s label property is, by default, the text that gets inserted when the completion is selected if no other suitable properties are provided.

later(function()
  local process_items_opts = { kind_priority = { Text = -1, Snippet = 99 } }
  local process_items = function(items, base)
    local res = MiniCompletion.default_process_items(items, base, process_items_opts)
    for _, item in ipairs(res) do
      local label = item.label
      if label and #label > 25 then
        item.label = label:sub(1, 24) .. "…"
      end
    end
    return res
  end
  require('mini.completion').setup({
    lsp_completion = {
      -- other configs
      process_items = process_items,
    },
  })

[echasnovski]

To answer your question: yes, the config.lsp_completion.process_items is the suggested way to adjust that. The label field is usually the last fallback among candidate fields that determine which text is inserted. To work around this, make sure to set other fields that have higher precedence for inserting text. The specification allows several ways to do that, but for this purpose setting insertText field should work. So adding something like item.insertText = item.insertText or item.label before adjusting the label should do the trick.

To answer your problem: Neovim>=0.12 (current Nightly) has 'pummaxwidth' option that limits the width of the popup menu. It is not 100% the same, as it truncates candidate kind and labelDetails first, but it should be a good solution to not have hugely wide popups.

[alikhan-ab]

Adjusting labels in process_items suits me better, because one of my language servers (sourcekit) returns candidates with long labels for almost every completion. I tried setting pummaxwidth with vim.o.completeitemalign = "kind,abbr,menu" to change the order so that kind is shown before label, but I found that I prefer seeing kind on the right side.

Thank you for suggesting setting insertText before adjusting the label! This, I think, solves all of my potential problems.
Btw, thank you for helping me out (this time and multiple times before). I feel a little bit hesitant posting here, because I don't want to waste your time, but I try to do so only after researching and trying stuff out on my own first.

[echasnovski]

I feel a little bit hesitant posting here, because I don't want to waste your time, but I try to do so only after researching and trying stuff out on my own first.

Well, "Q&A" discussions are exactly here to help people with 'mini.nvim' usage. And it is highly appreciated to ask only after own research. Thanks, this helps 🙏