Symbols¶
What is a symbol?
In LSP a “symbol”, is any sequence of characters that have a particular meaning to the file format you are currently working in. In programming languages this could include keywords, variables, type definitions etc.
esbonio currently identifies section headers and directives as symbols.
The language server supports both textDocument/documentSymbol and workspace/symbol requests.
Document Symbols¶
As the name suggests, the textDocument/documentSymbol request returns all the symbols contained in a given file.
The server can also include hierarchical information about the symbols, e.g. The symbol Sub-section is contained within the symbol Section.
In VSCode this information is typically used to populate the Outline view. You can also search for a symbol in the current document using the Ctrl+Shift+O keybinding.
Workspace Symbols¶
The workspace/symbol request allows your editor to ask Esbonio to search through all the symbols is has found in your workspace.
Unlike the textDocument/documentSymbol request there is no hierarchy information included and results are a simple flat list.
Depending on what a symbol represents, Esbonio will allow you to search for symbols by different criteria.
For sections, you can only search for the section name itself.
For directives you can search either by the directive’s name e.g.
figure::or its argument e.g./images/screenshot.jpg
In VSCode, you can perform a workspace symbol search by pressing Ctrl+T.