golang/go

x/tools/gopls: Symbols: use Levenshtein distance for ranking

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#74793 opened on Jul 29, 2025

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FeatureRequestToolsgoplshelp wanted

Description

I just sought the symbol testincreemntalnope and got an empty result, even though TestIncrementalNope exists. It's 2025, I shouldn't have to spell correctly. Let's rank candidates by Levenshtein distance from the search term and include the closest n results.

See Starlark's spell.Nearest for an implementation we can use.

Contributor guide

Tech stack
go
Domain
developer experiencetooling
Issue type
feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
3
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
1-3 hours
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
active
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
clear
Prerequisites
GogoplsLevenshtein distance
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
70
Research direction
The implementation should add Levenshtein distance ranking to gopls symbol search. An existing implementation can be found in Starlark's spell.Nearest (go.starlark.net/internal/spell). The goal is to modify the symbol ranking function in gopls to compute distances and include the closest candidates. Look for the symbol search logic in the gopls package, likely in the symbols handling files.