Feature Request: Support for custom perlcritic verbosity strings in Diagnostic Hovers

[adefaria]

The Problem

Currently, Perl Navigator appears to "sanitize" or truncate the output from perlcritic before displaying it in the VS Code hover and Problems tab. While core Perl pragmas (like strict) render full documentation nicely, Perl::Critic violations are reduced to a single-line summary, even when the user has configured a detailed, verbose string in their .perlcriticrc.

For a team of developers, Perl::Critic is a vital teaching tool. We want to include the policy description (%d) and direct MetaCPAN links (https://metacpan.org/pod/Perl::Critic::Policy::%p) so developers can learn why a policy exists without hunting for documentation manually.

Current Behavior

In .perlcriticrc, I have:

verbose = %m [Policy: %p] | %d | Docs: https://metacpan.org/pod/Perl::Critic::Policy::%p

When running perlcritic in the terminal, the output is rich and includes the full description and URL. However, in VS Code, the hover only shows:

Critic: [Message] ([Policy], Severity: [X]) perlnavigator

The custom description and the URL are completely discarded by the LSP's diagnostic parser.

Desired Behavior

The Perl Navigator LSP should respect the verbose format defined in the user's .perlcriticrc (or passed via perlnavigator.critic.args) and display the entire resulting string in the VS Code Diagnostic message. This would allow:

1. Clickable MetaCPAN links directly in the hover or Problems tab.
2. In-editor education via the %d description string.

Example of what we want to see in the hover:

Subroutine "_log" does not end with "return" [Policy: Subroutines::RequireFinalReturn]
The last statement of every subroutine should be an explicit return statement. This makes the intended return value clear...
Docs: https://metacpan.org/pod/Perl::Critic::Policy::Subroutines::RequireFinalReturn

Note: I'm using a Remote SSH environment on Amazon Linux

[bscan]

Hi @adefaria, thanks for filing the detailed issue. This feature is already available as perlcriticMessageFormat and almost works how you want. For example:

"perlnavigator.perlcriticMessageFormat": "%m [Policy: %p] | Docs: https://metacpan.org/pod/Perl::Critic::Policy::%p"

Gives this:

There are two current limitations.

First, the message format is not picked up from .perlcriticrc even though this profile is loaded and used when available. This is because the message format is overridden in the navigator to get structured data back from perlcritic. I need the line number and severity so it can be placed on the appropriate line with the right error level. Seems like it could be switched to the object interface of violations for this information instead of using the message format though. Doesn't seem like a big deal given the workaround available with the perlcriticMessageFormat setting.

PerlNavigator/server/src/perl/criticWrapper.pl

Line 45 in 88a695b

Perl::Critic::Violation::set_format("%s~|~%l~|~%c~|~${message_format}~|~%p~||~");

The second limitation is that multi-line messages do not currently work, so I needed to remove %d from your example. However, this could probably be fixed.

[adefaria]

The perlcriticMessageFormat workaround has hit a wall: VS Code’s UI prevents clicking or selectively copying URLs from diagnostic messages.

To make this usable, the Navigator needs to stop mangling the %m message and instead use the Diagnostic.codeDescription property (LSP Specification).

By putting the MetaCPAN link in codeDescription.href, the IDE will render it as a native, clickable link next to the policy name, and we can use the full %d description in the message without breaking the UI.