Create Tabby extension with Language Server Protocol | Tabby AI coding assistant

Excited to share that Tabby Agent now available on npm and supports running as a language server 🎉. This new feature provides a uniform protocol to easily integrate Tabby into different text editors. Let's dive deeper together to unfold the stories behind!What is Tabby Agent​Tabby Agent is a Node.js package that communicates with the Tabby server and implements several essential features for code completion, including:Debouncing: Tabby Agent handles code completion requests by implementing an appropriate debouncing mechanism. This ensures that requests are not sent too frequently, reducing server load and improving performance, as the automatic inline code completion often listens for text input which can be very frequent.Caching: Tabby Agent prevents redundant completion requests with KV caching. When a completion is dismissed but requested again at the same location, the cached content is used directly. Cached completions are also matched when the prefix of a request aligns with a previously cached completion, no need for additional server requests. This is especially useful when users type the same text as the ghost text suggestions.Post-processing: Tabby Agent enhances completion results through post-processings including filtering out low-quality completions, removing duplicate suggestions, and limiting the length of suggestions to the focused scope. All of these post-processings help users focus on the most relevant suggestions.These features were initially developed as part of the Tabby VSCode extension. Now it's desirable to reuse the client code logic as Tabby expands to more text editors. Therefore, we are building Tabby Agent as a standalone Node.js package that can be used by other editors to communicate with Tabby.Tabby Agent previously utilized a customized protocol based on JSON Lines, designed to be compatible with VIM's JSON mode channel. However, this protocol was not widely adopted, making it hard to integrate Tabby Agent to different editors. With a more universal protocol, we can offer a more flexible and streamlined experience in creating Tabby plugins for various editors.The Language Server Protocol defines a standardized protocol for communication between a language server and its clients. It provides methods to implement a wide range of features, including code completion.Running Tabby as a Language Server provides code completion with the standard textDocument/completion protocol. It can suggest code completions based on the context of the code, whether it's a line or a block, rather than just a single word.I'm also looking forward to the proposed textDocument/inlineCompletion feature in the upcoming version 3.18 of the LSP Specification. It will provide better support for multi-line code completions. Stay tuned for more updates on this topic in the future!Running Tabby as a Language Server​To run Tabby as a language server, follow these steps:Set up your Tabby server following this documentation.Make sure you have Node.js version 18 or above installed on your system.Run the following command in your terminal:npx tabby-agent --lsp --stdio‍Follow the instructions displayed in the console. Once the installation is complete, the Tabby agent will start listening for requests on StdIO. If there are no error messages, you can assume that the Tabby Agent script is running correctly. You can stop it by pressing Ctrl+C. Alternatively, you can install tabby-agent as a global package and run it by using the following command:4. You can configure the agent's settings by editing the config file located at ~/.tabby-client/agent/config.toml.If your Tabby server uses a different port or requires authentication, modify these settings accordingly:[server]

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