Don't highlight literals

[byehack]

• Language Server version: 2020.7.3
• OS and version: Version: 1.47.2 (user setup)
  Commit: 17299e413d5590b14ab0340ea477cdd86ff13daf
  Date: 2020-07-15T18:22:06.216Z
  Electron: 7.3.2
  Chrome: 78.0.3904.130
  Node.js: 12.8.1
  V8: 7.8.279.23-electron.0
  OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.18362
• Python version (& distribution if applicable, e.g. Anaconda): Python 3.7.7

[erictraut]

Thanks for submitting a bug report.

What behavior do you consider a bug?

Highlighting a string when you click in it is intended behavior — part of a language feature called "semantic highlighting". When you click on a string literal (or any identifier), the editor will highlight it and any other instances of it within the file. In the case of identifiers, it will also distinguish between writes and reads of that symbol, providing subtly different color hints for each.

[jakebailey]

In MPLS, we disabled any sort of highlighting inside literals (sans fstring sections) as they were a bit distracting, so this is probably a behavior difference from that.

[erictraut]

We could consider doing there here too, but it would be inconsistent with other language servers.

[jakebailey]

I don't think that's entirely true. I tested Go and TypeScript, and neither do this. (Nor do they enable hovers.)

[erictraut]

TypeScript's semantic highlight feature does highlight string literals. It doesn't include the quotes in the selection, but I decided when implementing the Python version that it made sense to include the quotes and the string type that precedes the quote.

[byehack]

Thanks for submitting a bug report.

What behavior do you consider a bug?

Highlighting a string when you click in it is intended behavior — part of a language feature called "semantic highlighting". When you click on a string literal (or any identifier), the editor will highlight it and any other instances of it within the file. In the case of identifiers, it will also distinguish between writes and reads of that symbol, providing subtly different color hints for each.

when i disabled pylance:

[jakebailey]

Go differs in that literals are not types, so that's probably part of the reason they don't do it. But I was wrong about TypeScript. I had to pick a small string to get TypeScript do to it (my multi-line example did not have this behavior).

But, I still don't think highlighting literals like this is very useful. I'd rather we only did it to actual bound names.

@byehack For reference, that is VS Code's default behavior where it doesn't know anything but the words in the file. If you were to say write:

test = 1234
"this is a test"

And then selected test, it's probably going to highlight it in both places.

The difference here is that we are highlighting the string literal as its own thing.

[byehack]

after disable pylance:

[rwols]

But, I still don't think highlighting literals like this is very useful. I'd rather we only did it to actual bound names.

Agreed. Just to give another example, clangd also doesn't highlight literals.

[rholland]

I agree that it is distracting. I prefer that it can optionally be turned off.

[jakebailey]

This issue has been fixed in version 2020.9.6, which we've just released. You can find the changelog here: https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#202096-23-september-2020