Kiwi VSCode

March 16, 2026 · View on GitHub

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Kiwi VSCode

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Better support for the Kiwi message format in Visual Studio Code.

Forked from connorskees/kiwi-lsp, which published on VSCode Marketplace, identified by connorskees.kiwi-lsp.

Table of Contents

Basic Features

The original plugin provides the following features:

  • TextMate-based syntax highlighting
  • Basic language configuration (including comments, bracket matching, etc.)
  • Code intelligence
    • Go to definition
    • Go to references
    • Auto-completion
    • Find all references
    • Code Lens support
    • Hover documentation
    • Basic code checking
  • Quick fixes
    • Auto-correct case errors
    • Generate next available ID for messages (especially useful for large messages with hundreds of fields)
  • Code formatting (Beta)
    • Built on Prettier with a custom plugin (prettier-plugin-kiwi)
    • Uses tree-sitter for parsing
    • Follows Protobuf-style formatting conventions
  • Automatic update checking
    • Checks for new versions from GitHub Releases on activation
    • Can be triggered manually via Kiwi: Check for Updates command

Code Formatting

This extension includes a built-in code formatter for .kiwi files, implemented as a Prettier plugin (prettier-plugin-kiwi) powered by a tree-sitter grammar (tree-sitter-kiwi). The formatter normalizes whitespace, blank lines, comments, and quote styles to produce consistent, Protobuf-style output.

Note: Code formatting is currently not available on Windows due to native module compatibility issues with tree-sitter.

For the full formatting specification, see Kiwi Formatting Specification.

@include Syntax

Motivation

The original plugin's code analysis functionality was limited to the currently open file. When cross-file references existed (e.g., derived.kiwi referencing types from enum.kiwi, base-1.kiwi, and base-2.kiwi), the existing functionality couldn't properly support this usage, resulting in code checking errors.

To address this, this plugin introduces a syntax that uses /// @include filename.kiwi at the beginning of the file to include other kiwi files. Example:

/// @include ../enum.kiwi
/// @include "./base-1.kiwi"
/// @include './base-2.kiwi'

Syntax Specification

  • Must be placed at the beginning of the content, ignoring whitespace characters like line breaks. Can have multiple lines, but placing it elsewhere is invalid (treated as comments)

    • Valid

      
/// @include ../enum.kiwi     // Valid

/// @include "./base-1.kiwi"  // Valid with empty line

    • Invalid

      message Rect {}

/// @include './base-1.kiwi'  // Invalid, because there's content before
message Vector {}

  • Must start with /// @include

  • File paths support both absolute and relative paths

  • Filenames can be wrapped in '' or "", or without quotes

  • Filenames are case-sensitive

  • Multiple inclusions are imported only once, similar to #pragma once

Plugin Adaptation

To adapt this syntax, the project implements the following features on top of the original plugin:

  1. Clicking on @include files enables jumping to the corresponding file
  2. When opening a .kiwi file, the plugin parses valid @include directives, concatenates dependent file contents to the current file for parsing, effectively declaring all dependencies in the current file
  3. @include directives only affect file parsing, content concatenation only occurs during parsing, warnings and errors still correspond to the current file
  4. Code Actions: Unaffected, providing correct suggestions
  5. Go to Definition: Clicking on types enables jumping to the corresponding code in the original file
  6. Auto-completion: After supporting @include directives, types from referenced files are added to the candidate list

Test Data

See the fixtures/intellisense/ directory, which contains test data for the language service.

The dependency relationships in the intellisense/ folder are as follows: package/derived.kiwi depends on enum.kiwi, package/base-1.kiwi, and package/base-2.kiwi. derived.kiwi uses types from enum.kiwi, base-1.kiwi, and base-2.kiwi. During parsing, the content of the three dependent files is added to the beginning of derived.kiwi.

enum.kiwi              \
package/base-1.kiwi ----> package/derived.kiwi
package/base-2.kiwi    /

Build Optimization

The original project only used tsc to compile code without a bundler. When packaging the plugin with vsce, the unoptimized output contained 590 files totaling ~760KB.

This project implements build optimizations:

  1. Uses tsup as the build tool
  2. Uses pnpm workspace to manage server/ and client/ modules

Documentation

Logo Design

The Logo was generated by Slea.ai using the following prompt:

a vector logo design, with the text "Kiwi", main symbol: messages, binary, code, programming language, the background is circular, minimalistic, be used in Internet industry, clear background.

Credits

License

MIT