Zed

Zed is a graphical text editor focusing on speed and collaborative editing.

Its Linux support is fairly recent, the NixOS support even more so.

Installation

The package zed-editor is available only from channel 24.11 onward.

CLI support is installed and aliased to zeditor

LSP Support

By default, Zed will try to download pre-built LSP servers in ~/.local/share/zed/languages/. This does not work for NixOS.

There's sadly no way to inject those from $PATH for now. Worse, the way to point to the language server is language-specific, there is no global configuration flag for now.

The following sections contain some language-specific setup working on NixOS.

rust-analyzer

Here, we'll assume rust-analyzer is globally installed in your system profile at /run/current-system/sw/bin/rust-analyzer. You may want to adapt this path in the following code snippet to something more relevant to your use case.

Add the following snippet to your zed configuration file:

 "lsp": {
   "rust-analyzer": {
     "binary": {
       "path": "/run/current-system/sw/bin/rust-analyzer",
     },
   }
 }

Home manager support

Zed is supported by home-manager, this way you are able to make a reproducible Zed setup.

userSettings option will be translated directly to json file.

note that home-manager configuration produces a read only `settings.json` this means some features which requires to write this file might not work. For example change model at runtime. Changing AI model at runtime tries to write in the configuration.

you can see an example of the home-manager configuration.

{pkgs, lib, ... }:

{
    programs.zed-editor = {
        enable = true;
        extensions = ["nix" "toml" "elixir" "make"];

        ## everything inside of these brackets are Zed options.
        userSettings = {

            assistant = {
                enabled = true;
                version = "2";
                default_open_ai_model = null;
                ### PROVIDER OPTIONS
                ### zed.dev models { claude-3-5-sonnet-latest } requires github connected
                ### anthropic models { claude-3-5-sonnet-latest claude-3-haiku-latest claude-3-opus-latest  } requires API_KEY
                ### copilot_chat models { gpt-4o gpt-4 gpt-3.5-turbo o1-preview } requires github connected
                default_model = { 
                    provider = "zed.dev";
                    model = "claude-3-5-sonnet-latest";
                };

                #                inline_alternatives = [
                #                    {
                #                        provider = "copilot_chat";
                #                        model = "gpt-3.5-turbo";
                #                    }
                #                ];
            };

            node = {
                path = lib.getExe pkgs.nodejs;
                npm_path = lib.getExe' pkgs.nodejs "npm";
            };

            hour_format = "hour24";
            auto_update = false;
            terminal = {
                alternate_scroll = "off";
                blinking = "off";
                copy_on_select = false;
                dock = "bottom";
                detect_venv = {
                    on = {
                        directories = [".env" "env" ".venv" "venv"];
                        activate_script = "default";
                    };
                };
                env = {
                    TERM = "alacritty";
                };
                font_family = "FiraCode Nerd Font";
                font_features = null;
                font_size = null;
                line_height = "comfortable";
                option_as_meta = false;
                button = false;
                shell = "system"; 
                #{
                #                    program = "zsh";
                #};
                toolbar = {
                    title = true;
                };
                working_directory = "current_project_directory";
            };



            lsp = {
                rust-analyzer = {

                    binary = {
                        #                        path = lib.getExe pkgs.rust-analyzer;
                        path_lookup = true;
                    };
                };
                nix = { 
                    binary = { 
                        path_lookup = true; 
                    }; 
                };

                elixir-ls = {
                    binary = {
                        path_lookup = true; 
                    };
                    settings = {
                        dialyzerEnabled = true;
                    };
                };
            };


            languages = {
                "Elixir" = {
                    language_servers = ["!lexical" "elixir-ls" "!next-ls"];
                    format_on_save = {
                        external = {
                            command = "mix";
                            arguments = ["format" "--stdin-filename" "{buffer_path}" "-"];
                        };
                    };
                };
                "HEEX" = {
                    language_servers = ["!lexical" "elixir-ls" "!next-ls"];
                    format_on_save = {
                        external = {
                            command = "mix";
                            arguments = ["format" "--stdin-filename" "{buffer_path}" "-"];
                        };
                    };
                };
            };

            vim_mode = true;
            ## tell zed to use direnv and direnv can use a flake.nix enviroment.
            load_direnv = "shell_hook";
            base_keymap = "VSCode";
            theme = {
                mode = "system";
                light = "One Light";
                dark = "One Dark";
            };
            show_whitespaces = "all" ;
            ui_font_size = 16;
            buffer_font_size = 16;

        };

    };
}