window/showDocument cannot show two documents because of preview mode

[rcjsuen]

If you have preview mode enabled, window/showDocument cannot be used to open two different documents because the last one will just overlap on top of the first one.

Is this behaviour intentional?

[dbaeumer]

This is something VS Code decides and is not under the control of the LSP VS Code client lib. I am pretty sure that the same happens when using the VS Code API directly. Have you tried this?

[rcjsuen]

This is something VS Code decides and is not under the control of the LSP VS Code client lib. I am pretty sure that the same happens when using the VS Code API directly. Have you tried this?

No, I haven't. But yes, I presume it is the same when using the VS Code API directly.

vscode-languageserver-node/client/src/common/client.ts

Lines 1343 to 1352 in 8e6bf18

	const options: TextDocumentShowOptions = {};
	if (params.selection !== undefined) {
	options.selection = this.protocol2CodeConverter.asRange(params.selection);
	}
	if (params.takeFocus === undefined || params.takeFocus === false) {
	options.preserveFocus = true;
	} else if (params.takeFocus === true) {
	options.preserveFocus = false;
	}
	await Window.showTextDocument(uri, options);

I guess my concern is that overlapping one file over the other seems counter to the intent of the window/showDocument request. I want to implement a "show affected files" action but on VS Code that will not work if the user has previews enabled (which from what I understand is the default setting in VS Code) because it will just keep overlapping the next one on top of the other. If we set preview to false on the TextDocumentShowOptions then the problem goes away.

I could also workaround the problem by using a middleware to intercept the request completely. 🤷

[dbaeumer]

Actually I don't want to add preview to the spec. This is very specific to editors. I think the best you can do for now is to handle this in the middleware. Is this OK for you?