Mobile LSP support [Working sample]

[hasanelfalakiy]

Can this Kotlin LSP be used on the Android editor using Sora Editor?

[Hessesian]

Yes, with a small workaround — just pushed TCP transport support.

kotlin-lsp is a native binary (can't run on Android directly), but Sora Editor's editor-lsp module supports socket connections, so you can run kotlin-lsp on a connected machine and have Sora Editor connect to it over TCP.

Setup:

1. Run kotlin-lsp in TCP mode on your desktop/laptop:

kotlin-lsp --port 9257

2. If connecting from an Android device via USB, forward the port:

adb forward tcp:9257 tcp:9257

3. In your Android app, use Sora Editor's editor-lsp module with a socket connection:

implementation(platform("io.github.rosemoe:editor-bom:<version>"))
implementation("io.github.rosemoe:editor-lsp")

val serverDefinition = languageServerDefinition {
    name("kotlin-lsp")
    ext("kt")
    connection {
        socket("127.0.0.1", 9257)   // or your machine's IP on Wi-Fi
    }
}
val project = LspProject(projectPath)
project.addServerDefinition(serverDefinition)
val lspEditor = project.createEditor("$projectPath/MyFile.kt")
lspEditor.editor = editor

The server accepts one client at a time and waits for the next connection after disconnect. Features available: completions, hover, go-to-definition, workspace symbols, diagnostics, inlay hints.

[hasanelfalakiy]

Yes, with a small workaround — just pushed TCP transport support.

kotlin-lsp is a native binary (can't run on Android directly), but Sora Editor's editor-lsp module supports socket connections, so you can run kotlin-lsp on a connected machine and have Sora Editor connect to it over TCP.

Setup:

1. Run kotlin-lsp in TCP mode on your desktop/laptop:

kotlin-lsp --port 9257

2. If connecting from an Android device via USB, forward the port:

adb forward tcp:9257 tcp:9257

3. In your Android app, use Sora Editor's editor-lsp module with a socket connection:

implementation(platform("io.github.rosemoe:editor-bom:<version>"))
implementation("io.github.rosemoe:editor-lsp")

val serverDefinition = languageServerDefinition {
    name("kotlin-lsp")
    ext("kt")
    connection {
        socket("127.0.0.1", 9257)   // or your machine's IP on Wi-Fi
    }
}
val project = LspProject(projectPath)
project.addServerDefinition(serverDefinition)
val lspEditor = project.createEditor("$projectPath/MyFile.kt")
lspEditor.editor = editor

The server accepts one client at a time and waits for the next connection after disconnect. Features available: completions, hover, go-to-definition, workspace symbols, diagnostics, inlay hints.

thanks for the information, so do i have to build the binary with this? : cargo build --release and where to put it?

[Wadamzmail]

@Hessesian
can we run it in terminal like termux?

[Hessesian]

Hey @hasanelfalakiy — the confusion makes sense, let me clarify.

You don't need to build anything. Download the prebuilt binary for your OS from the GitHub Releases page — pick the file matching your desktop platform (e.g. kotlin-lsp-linux-x86_64 or kotlin-lsp-darwin-aarch64).

The setup has two sides:

• Server (your desktop/laptop): run kotlin-lsp --port 9257 — this is the binary you downloaded
• Client (your Android app): the Kotlin snippet I shared goes in your app, connecting Sora Editor to the server over the network

So: no Rust, no building, no AAR — just download and run.

---

Want to run it fully on-device without a PC? That should work via Termux — install Termux on your Android device, download the kotlin-lsp-linux-aarch64 binary from releases, make it executable (chmod +x kotlin-lsp), and run ./kotlin-lsp --port 9257 in Termux. Then connect Sora Editor to 127.0.0.1:9257.

⚠️ Heads up: We haven't tested the Termux path ourselves, so this is our best guess based on how Termux works. Let us know how it goes — happy to update the docs based on your experience!

[hasanelfalakiy]

Hey @hasanelfalakiy — the confusion makes sense, let me clarify.

You don't need to build anything. Download the prebuilt binary for your OS from the GitHub Releases page — pick the file matching your desktop platform (e.g. kotlin-lsp-linux-x86_64 or kotlin-lsp-darwin-aarch64).

The setup has two sides:

• Server (your desktop/laptop): run kotlin-lsp --port 9257 — this is the binary you downloaded
• Client (your Android app): the Kotlin snippet I shared goes in your app, connecting Sora Editor to the server over the network

So: no Rust, no building, no AAR — just download and run.

---

Want to run it fully on-device without a PC? That should work via Termux — install Termux on your Android device, download the kotlin-lsp-linux-aarch64 binary from releases, make it executable (chmod +x kotlin-lsp), and run ./kotlin-lsp --port 9257 in Termux. Then connect Sora Editor to 127.0.0.1:9257.

⚠️ Heads up: We haven't tested the Termux path ourselves, so this is our best guess based on how Termux works. Let us know how it goes — happy to update the docs based on your experience!

ah ok thanks for the explanation

[hasanelfalakiy]

I just tried it in an android editor that supports external lsp connections, interesting , light and here are the results:
i use this app: https://github.com/Xed-Editor/Xed-Editor

[hasanelfalakiy]

[hasanelfalakiy]

you can use Xed Editor to debug boost targets for mobile

[Hessesian]

Amazing findings, so mobile works just like that? We can raise them an issue in repo to add guidelines for kotlin lsp! Nice job testing it out!

[hasanelfalakiy]

Amazing findings, so mobile works just like that? We can raise them an issue in repo to add guidelines for kotlin lsp! Nice job testing it out!

Yes, this is very interesting, but this Kotlin LSP cannot index Android artifact .aar and JVM artifact .jar files, because I have tried it earlier.

[hasanelfalakiy]

Amazing findings, so mobile works just like that? We can raise them an issue in repo to add guidelines for kotlin lsp! Nice job testing it out!

I really want to send the screen recording results here, but for some reason I can't

[Hessesian]

Good catch @hasanelfalakiy — you're right that we can't index binary .aar/.jar files directly (no bytecode decompiler). But if you have the sources available, we just shipped a fix for exactly this.

New in v0.11.0: extract-sources CLI subcommand

If Gradle has downloaded *-sources.jar files to its cache (which it does for most popular Android libraries), you can unpack them so the LSP can index them:

kotlin-lsp extract-sources

This walks your Gradle cache (~/.gradle/caches/modules-2/files-2.1), deduplicates by latest version, and extracts .kt/.java sources to ~/.kotlin-lsp/sources. The CLI find/hover/refs commands then pick that directory up automatically.

You can also filter to specific groups:

kotlin-lsp extract-sources androidx.compose org.jetbrains.kotlin

Or dry-run first to see what would be extracted:

kotlin-lsp extract-sources --dry-run

For libraries that don't publish a -sources.jar at all — you're right, we can't do much there without bytecode decompilation, which is out of scope for this project. But in practice most popular libs (Compose, Coroutines, OkHttp, etc.) do publish sources.

[hasanelfalakiy]

Good catch @hasanelfalakiy — you're right that we can't index binary .aar/.jar files directly (no bytecode decompiler). But if you have the sources available, we just shipped a fix for exactly this.

New in v0.11.0: extract-sources CLI subcommand

If Gradle has downloaded *-sources.jar files to its cache (which it does for most popular Android libraries), you can unpack them so the LSP can index them:

kotlin-lsp extract-sources

This walks your Gradle cache (~/.gradle/caches/modules-2/files-2.1), deduplicates by latest version, and extracts .kt/.java sources to ~/.kotlin-lsp/sources. The CLI find/hover/refs commands then pick that directory up automatically.

You can also filter to specific groups:

kotlin-lsp extract-sources androidx.compose org.jetbrains.kotlin

Or dry-run first to see what would be extracted:

kotlin-lsp extract-sources --dry-run

For libraries that don't publish a -sources.jar at all — you're right, we can't do much there without bytecode decompilation, which is out of scope for this project. But in practice most popular libs (Compose, Coroutines, OkHttp, etc.) do publish sources.

wow interesting, if I have free time I will try it