I was recently trying out the Zed editor instead of VSCode, however for a while I was struggling with getting the language server to work for a project. I wasn't seeing any inlay hints, nor any hover tooltips for any JavaScript or TypeScript code, it was getting pretty frustrating.
I was about to give up on it and go back to VSCode, but I figured I'd give it one last go.
After some debugging, I found out a few things that felt decently buried in their support forums so I figured I'd blog them here in case others run into the same issue and are looking for the solution.
TL;DR:
If you aren't getting any type hints / hover tooltips etc for JavaScript or
TypeScript and you're not sure why, check for package.json or node_modules
in your root directory (~/). If those files/folders exist, delete them and
close and re-open Zed!
Apparently Zed installs language servers (or at least the
typescript-language-server) from npm, however it usually does this within some
subdirectory where it caches a few other things, something like
~/Library/Application Support/Zed/.
However, that logic that Zed uses to install the language server maybe shortcuts
/ runs into an issue if you have a top level package.json within your root
directory, e.g. ~/. In that case, it installs the language server at the root
instead of within the application's folder.
This will wreck some havoc when Zed tries to launch the language server when it
starts up. Another pro tip is that you can check the logs from Zed in the
following log file: ~/Library/Logs/Zed/Zed.log.
I found this solution from this GitHub comment!