In Zed, goto definition opens up the "find references" UI instead of navigating

[flowerett]

Found this in an Elixir forum thread.

It seems like this only happens with multiple function heads, so we could either default to the first definition or make it configurable.

Update:

The Zed extension is just a passthrough here, it can't filter definition results with the current extension API, so we need to do a fix in Dexter.

When a function has multiple heads (e.g. multiple def foo/1 clauses), Dexter's Definition handler returns all of them as separate Location entries. When Zed receives multiple locations from textDocument/definition, it shows the "find references" picker UI instead of jumping directly.

Fix options (in Dexter):

• Return only the first location - simplest, just results[:1] before converting to locations
• Group by function and return only the first head - slightly smarter, still just one jump target
• Make it configurable - as the issue suggests, let users choose between "first definition" and "all definitions"

I would go with v3

[michallepicki]

I think a sequence of multiple function heads with the same arity in the same module should be considered one candidate. Different arities or functions with the same name but in different modules (even if in the same file) should still be separate. And then Dexter should not give options but navigate to the first head if there is only one candidate reachable from given call site. If there are multiple candidates I still see the need to show them as a list of found references to pick from

[JesseHerrick]

This indeed happens when there are multiple function heads, but I would consider it more helpful than harmful. Consider the following code:

defmodule MyApp.Accounts do
  def fetch_user(%Login{}) do
    # ...
  end

  def fetch_user(email) when is_binary(email) do
    # ...
  end

  def fetch_user(id) when is_integer(id) do
    # ...
  end
end

If I go-to-definition on a call to MyApp.Accounts.fetch_user/1, the LSP shows you all three function head locations and lets you pick. This is because the LSP does not know which one you want to go to. If we were to instead just take you to the first one and you actually wanted the middle one, you'd still have to scroll down to find the actual definition you want. So while maybe it seems unusual, this actually is quite a helpful feature.

Now something even cooler would be if we could further infer the correct function head by the types of the arguments, but this is much more complicated to do 😄.

So given that this is tricky to configure in some of the editors, I'm open to add a configuration option for this in the LSP, but I just wanted to make my case for why I think that this is actually the correct default behavior.

[knoebber]

Hi, thanks for opening this issue! I am the author of the forum comment.

It seems like the "Go to Definition" option in the zed context menu (or g d vim motion) opens the "references" view if the symbol appears more than once, regardless of how many times the function was defined. So the problem is more broadly scoped than the multiple-function-heads case I had asked about.

example of it working

Screen.Recording.2026-04-18.at.7.36.06.AM.mov

example of it showing all references even though function is defined once in another module

Screen.Recording.2026-04-18.at.7.31.18.AM.mov

Please let me know if there is anyway I can debug this more. I'd be happy to e.g. run sqlite queries or enable more lsp logging.
I'm using the latest version of dexter and elixir extension.

* Server: dexter (id 8)

* Version: 0.5.3