Rust

Rust support is available natively in Zed.

• Tree Sitter: tree-sitter/tree-sitter-rust
• Language Server: rust-lang/rust-analyzer

Inlay Hints

The following configuration can be used to change the inlay hint settings for rust-analyzer in Rust:

{
  "lsp": {
    "rust-analyzer": {
      "initialization_options": {
        "inlayHints": {
          "maxLength": null,
          "lifetimeElisionHints": {
            "enable": "skip_trivial",
            "useParameterNames": true
          },
          "closureReturnTypeHints": {
            "enable": "always"
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

See Inlay Hints in the Rust Analyzer Manual for more information.

Target directory

The rust-analyzer target directory can be set in initialization_options:

{
  "lsp": {
    "rust-analyzer": {
      "initialization_options": {
        "rust": {
          "analyzerTargetDir": true
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

A true setting will set the target directory to target/rust-analyzer. You can set a custom directory with a string like "target/analyzer" instead of true.

Binary

You can configure which rust-analyzer binary Zed should use.

By default, Zed will try to find a rust-analyzer in your $PATH and try to use that. If that binary successfully executes rust-analyzer --help, it's used. Otherwise, Zed will fall back to installing its own rust-analyzer version and using that.

If you want to disable Zed looking for a rust-analyzer binary, you can set ignore_system_version to true in your settings.json:

{
  "lsp": {
    "rust-analyzer": {
      "binary": {
        "ignore_system_version": true
      }
    }
  }
}

If you want to use a binary in a custom location, you can specify a path and optional args:

{
  "lsp": {
    "rust-analyzer": {
      "binary": {
        "path": "/Users/example/bin/rust-analyzer",
        "args": []
      }
    }
  }
}

This "path" has to be an absolute path.

More server configuration

Rust-analyzer manual describes various features and configuration options for rust-analyzer language server. Rust-analyzer in Zed runs with the default parameters.

Large projects and performance

One of the main caveats that might cause extensive resource usage on large projects, is the combination of the following features:

rust-analyzer.checkOnSave (default: true)
    Run the check command for diagnostics on save.

rust-analyzer.check.workspace (default: true)
    Whether --workspace should be passed to cargo check. If false, -p <package> will be passed instead.

rust-analyzer.cargo.allTargets (default: true)
    Pass --all-targets to cargo invocation

Which would mean that every time Zed saves, a cargo check --workspace --all-targets command is run, checking the entire project (workspace), lib, doc, test, bin, bench and other targets.

While that works fine on small projects, it does not scale well.

The alternatives would be to use tasks, as Zed already provides a cargo check --workspace --all-targets task and the ability to cmd/ctrl-click on the terminal output to navigate to the error, and limit or turn off the check on save feature entirely.

Check on save feature is responsible for returning part of the diagnostics based on cargo check output, so turning it off will limit rust-analyzer with its own diagnostics.

Consider more rust-analyzer.cargo. and rust-analyzer.check. and rust-analyzer.diagnostics. settings from the manual for more fine-grained configuration. Here's a snippet for Zed settings.json (the language server will restart automatically after the lsp.rust-analyzer section is edited and saved):

{
  "lsp": {
    "rust-analyzer": {
      "initialization_options": {
        // get more cargo-less diagnostics from rust-analyzer,
        // which might include false-positives (those can be turned off by their names)
        "diagnostics": {
          "experimental": {
            "enable": true
          }
        },
        // To disable the checking entirely
        // (ignores all cargo and check settings below)
        "checkOnSave": false,
        // To check the `lib` target only.
        "cargo": {
          "allTargets": false
        },
        // Use `-p` instead of `--workspace` for cargo check
        "check": {
          "workspace": false
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Multi-project workspaces

If you want rust-analyzer to analyze multiple Rust projects in the same folder that are not listed in [members] in the Cargo workspace, you can list them in linkedProjects in the local project settings:

{
  "lsp": {
    "rust-analyzer": {
      "initialization_options": {
        "linkedProjects": ["./path/to/a/Cargo.toml", "./path/to/b/Cargo.toml"]
      }
    }
  }
}

Snippets

There's a way get custom completion items from rust-analyzer, that will transform the code according to the snippet body:

{
  "lsp": {
    "rust-analyzer": {
      "initialization_options": {
        "completion": {
          "snippets": {
            "custom": {
              "Arc::new": {
                "postfix": "arc",
                "body": ["Arc::new(${receiver})"],
                "requires": "std::sync::Arc",
                "scope": "expr"
              },
              "Some": {
                "postfix": "some",
                "body": ["Some(${receiver})"],
                "scope": "expr"
              },
              "Ok": {
                "postfix": "ok",
                "body": ["Ok(${receiver})"],
                "scope": "expr"
              },
              "Rc::new": {
                "postfix": "rc",
                "body": ["Rc::new(${receiver})"],
                "requires": "std::rc::Rc",
                "scope": "expr"
              },
              "Box::pin": {
                "postfix": "boxpin",
                "body": ["Box::pin(${receiver})"],
                "requires": "std::boxed::Box",
                "scope": "expr"
              },
              "vec!": {
                "postfix": "vec",
                "body": ["vec![${receiver}]"],
                "description": "vec![]",
                "scope": "expr"
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}