Editor Configuration

These settings configure the Badness language server. See Editor Setup for editor-specific configuration examples and Language Server for its capabilities. Project settings belong in badness.toml.

Supplying settings

Supply settings as initializationOptions at startup or through workspace/didChangeConfiguration, either as a bare object or under a badness key.

Formatter widths: lineWidth and indentWidth serve as fallbacks. A discovered badness.toml takes precedence over both. Without one, your editor’s tab size, sent with each formatting request, overrides the indent width.

The language server is also the sole consumer of the [build] section of badness.toml, which locates the .aux files produced by compilation; see the Configuration reference.

TEXMF discovery

The language server discovers the installed TeX tree to resolve packages for document links, package hover, go-to-definition, and completion of installed package names. The TeX installation’s location depends on the machine, so these settings come from the editor. They never affect badness format or badness lint, whose output depends only on the input, regardless of what is installed.

The texmf object has three optional keys:

• enabled (boolean, default true): whether to scan the TEXMF tree at all. When false, package resolution stays local to the document’s directory.
• roots (array of paths, default []): extra TEXMF root directories to index in addition to (and ahead of) the discovered ones. Useful for a nonstandard installation that kpsewhich can’t see.
• useKpsewhich (boolean, default true): whether to run kpsewhich to discover the TEXMF tree roots. When false, discovery falls back to default-path heuristics only.

{ "texmf": { "enabled": true, "roots": ["/opt/texmf"], "useKpsewhich": true } }

Forward and inverse search

Jump between a source line and the matching place in the compiled PDF.

Badness never typesets, and it never reads a .synctex.gz. Forward search identifies the file your cursor is in, the root document’s PDF, and the line number, then passes them to your configured viewer. Every SyncTeX-aware viewer (zathura, Okular, SumatraPDF, Skim) links libsynctex and does the mapping itself, which is why they all want a file and a line rather than a coordinate. Inverse search runs in the other direction and is started by the viewer.

You need a PDF compiled with SyncTeX enabled. Run latexmk -pdf -synctex=1, or pass -synctex=1 directly to pdflatex or lualatex. Use your existing build setup or an extension such as LaTeX Workshop; Badness does not compile the document.

Configuring the viewer

The viewer program and its name depend on the machine, so configure them through the editor, as with TEXMF discovery. Where the PDF lives is project data and belongs to the [build] section instead.

The forwardSearch object has these keys:

• executable (string): the viewer program. Spawned directly, not through a shell, so it is a program name and never a command line—putting flags here ("zathura --synctex-forward") silently fails to launch. This is the most common misconfiguration.
• args (array of strings): the viewer’s arguments. Required—there is no useful default, since every viewer spells forward search differently. Without it, forward search reports itself unconfigured.
• ipcDir (path, optional): where inverse-search servers advertise themselves. An escape hatch for containers and sandboxes; see below.

Each argument may carry:

An argument wrapped entirely in " is passed through with the quotes stripped and nothing substituted—the escape hatch when a viewer needs a literal %.

These settings match texlab’s, so you can reuse an existing configuration unchanged:

{
  "forwardSearch": {
    "executable": "zathura",
    "args": ["--synctex-forward", "%l:1:%f", "%p"]
  }
}

Triggering forward search

The server handles textDocument/forwardSearch, a custom request with the standard { textDocument, position } parameters. It uses the same method name and parameters as texlab, so a client written for texlab works unchanged. The server always answers the request with a status:

The capability is advertised as experimental.textDocumentForwardSearch.

If forward search opens the wrong PDF, or reports status 2 on a project that has been built, the server probably cannot find the root document. See root in the [build] reference.

Inverse search

Configure your viewer to run:

badness inverse-search --input "%f" --line "%l"

substituting the viewer’s own placeholders. For zathura that is:

zathura --synctex-editor-command "badness inverse-search --input %{input} --line %{line}"

Use --line0 instead if your viewer counts lines from zero. (--line1 is accepted as a synonym for --line, so a texlab configuration ports directly.)

The command finds the language server whose workspace contains the file and asks it to reveal the position, so an editor must already have that project open, and its LSP client must support window/showDocument. Servers register only when their client supports window/showDocument. Inverse search cannot reveal a position without that support, and the command reports when no server is listening.

With several editor windows open, the server whose workspace root contains the file wins; the longest matching root is preferred, so nested projects resolve deterministically.

Servers advertise themselves in $BADNESS_IPC_DIR, else a per-user directory under your runtime directory ($XDG_RUNTIME_DIR), else the temporary directory. The forwardSearch.ipcDir setting overrides these locations, which is useful when the viewer and server see different filesystems, as in a container or remote development setup. Keep it short: a Unix socket path cannot exceed about 100 bytes, and Badness logs an error if yours does. On a system with no $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR and a /tmp shared between users, that last fallback is worth knowing about: the directory is created 0700, the advertisements 0600, and Badness ignores any advertisement it does not own, so another user can neither read nor impersonate one.

SyncTeX maps the source as it was compiled. With unsaved edits, buffer line numbers and PDF line numbers drift apart until you rebuild.