Best way to add custom autocomplete/annotations?

[gingerbeardman]

I'm a Playdate developer, and this system has its own SDK with functions written in Lua.

I managed to get autocompletition/hints to pick up the Playdate function definitions after reading:

• https://github.com/LuaLS/lua-language-server/wiki/Annotations
• https://github.com/LuaLS/lua-language-server/wiki/Libraries

To do so I use the stub.lua and .luarc.json from either of

• https://github.com/notpeter/playdate-luacats (detailed)
• https://github.com/notpeter/playdate-docdef (minimal)

...and add them to my project folder.

Anyway, I'm new to Zed so I'm wondering if this is the best way?

I tried adding it at:

• ~/Library/Application Support/Zed/languages/lua-language-server/meta/playdate/stub.lua
  ...but this did not work.

Minimal

Detailed

I can modify the stub.lua to markdown format all URLs to make them clickable in the annotation.

[Stanzilla]

I'm also looking for a way to do this, in VSC, the extension supports a workspace based library setting that you can feed files/folders to, an equivalent to this in Zed would be great.

[and3rson]

Looking for the same thing. We've integrated Lua into our community-driven DIY console project (https://github.com/and3rson/lilka) and our library defines a lot of global functions for graphics, inputs, hardware, etc.
I'm wondering what's the best way to give our users auto-completion for writing Lua scripts for our platform.

[notpeter]

@Stanzilla The editor-agnostic way to configure LuaLS is with .luarc.json, it supports the same keys you're using in your VSCode workspace config but without the lua. prefix. This works for me in Zed.

[Stanzilla]

It did not work at the time of my posting but I can test again.

[notpeter]

Curious if you were ever able to get this working and would love to help troubleshoot if not.

[Stanzilla]

Curious if you were ever able to get this working and would love to help troubleshoot if not.

I haven't tried Lua in Zed since then, but I do have a repo with a luarc.json file https://github.com/WeakAuras/WeakAuras2

[notpeter]

I think a per-project .luarc.json is the right answer here. It supports the same features as the lua.* namespace items (like lua.workspace in .vscode/settings.json) as the sumneko.lua VSCode Lua extension just without the lua prefix.

Notably LuaLS supports .luarc.json universally across editors (VSCode, NeoVim, Zed, etc) without requiring extension specific settings.

The second question is how to have your project find external stubs:

1. Use an absolute path in workspace pointing at wherever you checked out the stubs (simple and works great for solo playdate developers)
2. Use a relative path in workspace and include instructions to checkout the stubs repo in a peer directory of your project (e.g. ~/code/playdate-luacats and ~/code/projectname -- and "workspace": ["../playdate-luacats"])
3. Use git submodules in your repo (ideal, but more complex for users)

@gingerbeardman I changed the format of links in annotations to use markdown to make them clickable in Zed in response to the above, thanks for catching that. Commit here: notpeter/playdate-luacats@98861f1

The above is focused on Lua autocomplete/annotations in Zed via LuaLS, but if you wanted to move beyond that you Zed supports code intelligence (autocomplete, snippets, linting, etc) custom language servers and to a lesser extent via tree-sitter grammars.