Overview

The D Completion Daemon is an auto-complete program for the D programming language.

(The above is a screenshot of Textadept)

DCD is not an IDE. DCD is designed to provide autocompletion for your favorite text editor. If you are looking for an IDE, try one of these.

DCD consists of a client and a server. The client (dcd-client) is almost always used through a text editor script or plugin, though it can be used from the command line. The server (dcd-server) is responsible for caching imported files, calculating autocomplete information, and sending it back to the client.

Status

This program is reasonably stable. Please report problems on the Github issue tracker. Please be sure that you have read the documentation before filing an issue.

• Working:
  • Autocompletion of properties of built-in types such as int, float, double, etc.
  • Autocompletion of __traits, scope, and extern arguments
  • Autocompletion of enums
  • Autocompletion of class, struct, and interface instances.
  • Display of call tips for functions, constructors, and variables of function type
  • alias declarations
  • Public imports
  • Finding the declaration location of a symbol at the cursor
  • import statement completions
  • Display of documentation comments in function call tips
  • alias this
  • auto declarations (Mostly)
  • with statements
• Not working:
  • UFCS suggestions
  • Autocompletion of declarations with template arguments (This will work to some extent, but it won't do things like replace T with int)
  • Determining the type of an enum member when no base type is specified, but the first member has an initialaizer
  • That one feature that you REALLY needed

Setup

1. Install a recent D compiler. DCD is tested with 2.066 and LDC 0.14.0.
2. Run git submodule update --init after cloning this repository to grab the MessagePack and Datapacked libraries and the parser from DScanner.
3. Run make to build the client and server. (Or run build.bat on Windows). make ldc and make gdc will use the LDC or GDC compilers. The resulting executable will be much faster.
4. Configure your text editor to call the dcd-client program. See the editors folder for directions on configuring your specific editor.
5. Start the dcd-server program before editing code. (Unless, of course, your editor's plugin handles this for you)

Client

Because DCD is designed to be used from a text editor, this section is written primarily for plugin authors.

Get autocomplete information

The primary use case of the client is to query the server for autocomplete information. To do this, provide the client with the file that the user is editing along with the cursor position (in bytes).

dcd-client -c123 sourcefile.d

This will cause the client to print a listing of completions to stdout. The client will print either a listing of function call tips, or a listing of of completions depending on if the cursor was directly after a dot character or after a left parethesis.

The file name is optional. If it is not specified, input will be read from stdin.

Dot completion

When the first line of output is "identifiers", the editor should display a completion list.

Output format

A line containing the string "identifiers" followed by the completions that are available, one per line. Each line consists of the completion name followed by a tab character, followed by a completion kind

Completion kinds

• c - class name
• i - interface name
• s - struct name
• u - union name
• v - variable name
• m - member variable name
• k - keyword, built-in version, scope statement
• f - function or method
• g - enum name
• e - enum member
• P - package name
• M - module name
• a - array
• A - associative array
• l - alias name
• t - template name
• T - mixin template name

Example output

identifiers
parts	v
name	v
location	v
qualifier	v
kind	v
type	v
resolvedType	v
calltip	v
getPartByName	f

Note

DCD's output will start with "identifiers" when completing at a left paren character if the keywords pragma, scope, __traits, extern, or version were just before the paren.

Parenthesis completion

When the first line of output is "calltips", the editor should display a function call tip.

Output format

A line containing the string "calltips", followed by zero or more lines, each containing a call tip for an overload of the given function.

Example output

calltips
ACSymbol findSymbolInCurrentScope(size_t cursorPosition, string name)

Doc comment display

dcd-client --doc -c 4298 When run with the --doc or -d option, DCD will attempt to display documentation comments associated with the symbol at the cursor position. In the case of functions there can be more than one documentation comment associated with a symbol. One doc comment will be printed per line. Newlines within the doc comments will be replaced with "\n".

Example output

An example doc comment\nParams: a = first param\n    Returns: nothing
An example doc comment\nParams: a = first param\n     b = second param\n    Returns: nothing

Clear server's autocomplete cache

dcd-client --clearCache

Add import search path

Import paths can be added to the server without restarting it. To accomplish this, run the client with the -I option:

dcd-client -Ipath/to/imports

Find declaration of symbol at cursor

dcd-client --symbolLocation -c 123

The "--symbolLocation" or "-l" flags cause the client to instruct the server to return the path to the file and the byte offset of the declaration of the symbol at the given cursor position.

The output consists of the absolute path to the file followed by a tab character followed by the byte offset, followed by a newline character. For example:

/home/example/src/project/bar.d	3482

Search for symbols by name

The "--search" or "-s" option causes the server to return location information for all symbols with the given name in both the file being edited as well as the server cache. The output format is one result per line, with the path, the symbol type, and the byte offset of the symbol separated by tab characters.

Example

Search the server's cache for symbols named "toImpl". (Using echo to give an EOF in place of a file being edited.) ```echo | dcd-client --search toImpl``

/usr/include/dmd/phobos/std/conv.d  f   48491
/usr/include/dmd/phobos/std/conv.d  f   47527
/usr/include/dmd/phobos/std/conv.d  f   47229
/usr/include/dmd/phobos/std/conv.d  f   40358
/usr/include/dmd/phobos/std/conv.d  f   38348
/usr/include/dmd/phobos/std/conv.d  f   35619
/usr/include/dmd/phobos/std/conv.d  f   32743
/usr/include/dmd/phobos/std/conv.d  f   22486
/usr/include/dmd/phobos/std/conv.d  f   16322
/usr/include/dmd/phobos/std/conv.d  f   14829
/usr/include/dmd/phobos/std/conv.d  f   14066
/usr/include/dmd/phobos/std/conv.d  f   13058
/usr/include/dmd/phobos/std/conv.d  f   12717
/usr/include/dmd/phobos/std/conv.d  f   9494

#Server The server must be running for the DCD client to provide autocomplete information. In future versions the client may start the server if it is not running, but for now it must be started manually or by an editor plugin.

Configuration Files

The server will attempt to read the file ~/.config/dcd on Posix systems, or dcd.conf on Windows in the current working directory on startup. If it exists, each line of the file is interpreted as a path that should be searched when looking for module imports.

Keep in mind that DCD treats import paths the same way that the compiler does. For example, a configuration file like this will not work as expected:

/usr/include/dmd/

What you actually want is this:

/usr/include/dmd/druntime/import
/usr/include/dmd/phobos

##Shut down the server The server can be shut down by running the client with the correct option:

dcd-client --shutdown

Import directories

Import directories can be specified on the command line at startup:

dcd-server -I/home/user/code/one -I/home/user/code/two

Port number

The --port or -p option lets you specify the port number that the server will listen on.