Currently, the recommended workflow starts with alr edit which sets the environment necessary for working with Alire and then launches VSCode. The Ada plugin for VSCode then launches the ada_language_server and allows VSCode to communicate with it via LSP, and since the terminal launched VSCode which launches ada-language-server, the environment is carried over to each child process. This works, but...

It is really annoying to have to restart the whole editor when the alire configuration changes, or I want to switch to a different gpr project file. In my case, since I was using NeoVim, I wrote this plugin that detects that I am editing in an alire workspace and sets the environment by parsing the output of alr printenv. It also allows me to switch gpr files. If we had a similar plugin for VSCode, users could just install both the Ada and Alire plugins and everything would work automagically.

It would also enable Gitpod to work for Alire projects out-of-the-box. It is not (yet?) possible to set editor-wide environment variables, so in the meantime you need to set your gitpod dotfiles in preferences to https://github.com/TamaMcGlinn/gitpod_alire_dotfiles or include the same hackaround in your existing dotfiles. (you can try it out on Adabots_Examples by clicking here). A separate plugin would fix that because you could specify it in your .gitpod.yml for the repo.

I might write the plugin myself, but I wanted to post here to see if anyone is already working on it.