Comment Directives

Chop uses special comments to provide hints to the Intellisense engine and to issue commands. These directives are a powerful way to enhance type information and control Chop’s behavior directly from your code.

Important: Directives must be in a single-line comment, start with three dashes (---), and be immediately followed by the directive symbol (@ or /). They do not work in block comments (--[[...]]).

There are two types of comment directives: Type Hints and Chop Commands.

Type Hints (---@)

Type hints work similarly to JSDoc annotations in JavaScript, allowing you to “hint” the type of a variable binding. This tells Chop to provide rich, accurate autocomplete for that variable.

Exporting Types from Modules

For a type to be available to the hint system, it must be explicitly exported from a Mince module using Luau’s export type syntax.

For example, inside a module named SomeModule, you would define and export a type like this:

-- Inside SomeModule
export type ThisType = {
    Name: string,
    Value: number
}
 
-- ... module logic

Asserting a Type

Once a type is exported, you can use ---@ModuleName.TypeName to inform Chop of a variable’s type.

-- With a hint, Chop now knows MyVar is of type "ThisType" from "SomeModule"
local MyVar: any = GetSomeData() ---@SomeModule.ThisType
 
-- Now, you will get autocomplete for MyVar's properties
print(MyVar.Name)

You can also hint the type of a module singleton itself, which is useful if you want to use your own module loading systems.

local SomeModule = ModuleLoader:Get("SomeModule") ---@SomeModule

Limitations & Workarounds

• Export Source: Types can only be “exported” from and recognized within Mince-managed modules.
• Not Real Types: These hints are only for Chop’s Intellisense. They are not real Luau types and cannot be re-exported.

Silencing the Roblox LSP

Because plugins do not have access to Roblox’s official Luau Language Server (LSP), Chop’s autocomplete suggestions will sometimes be mixed with Roblox’s native suggestions.

To fix this, you can use : any (or assert :: any) to silence the Roblox LSP for a specific variable. This will stop Roblox’s type checker from interfering and remove any conflicting native suggestions.

-- This tells the Roblox LSP to ignore this variable, letting Chop take over.
local MyItem: any = PlayerData:GetItemData("Sword") ---@Shop.Item

Chop Commands (---/)

Chop Commands are used to issue instructions to the Chop plugin itself.

--/ChopTrack

Currently, the only available command is ChopTrack. Placing this directive directly after a function declaration tells Chop’s Insights system to collect performance statistics and record information about that function’s execution.

local function CalculateComplexValue(x, y, z) ---/ChopTrack
    -- ... some expensive calculations
    return result
end

For more details on how this data is used, see Insights.