You edit the Natural sources in the source editor of Visual Studio Code. Features that go beyond plain text editing, including the error markers, syntax highlighting, code completion, navigation, and refactorings described in the topics below, are provided by the Natural language server. The language server is a Java process that starts in the background as soon as the first Natural source is opened.

All of this functionality relies on data provided by the Natural language server. The language server parses the sources in the project and maintains information about their tokens, the objects in the project and their variables, and the references between these objects.

The editor itself does not analyze the sources. Instead, for each command, it requests the required information from the language server and displays the results, such as errors in the Problems view, token types for syntax highlighting, proposals for content assist, definitions for Go to Definition, and occurrences for Find All References.

Because this information is derived from the parsed sources rather than from a text search, the language server can distinguish a keyword from a variable with the same name and find a definition even if it is located in a data area of another object.

The editing features for Natural sources are described in the topics below.