How to disable background formatting…?

[hedefalk]

I'm using metals from zed and I'm currently working in a monorepo on entirely unrelated code. metals seem to trigger formatting in the background of files I've never even opened a buffer for. How do I disable this?

Sonnet suggested it was the presentation compiler and that "enableScalafmtOnBuild" should fix it but seems to be hallucination :)

[tgodzik]

Metals doesn't format files unless explicitly asked by the editor to do so. The request to do it actually works on a single file, we never format anything on our own.

[hedefalk]

we never format anything on our own.

Thanks, good to know and that figures. Been away from this for too long to have a good idea how to debug this right now. Any help here is highly appreciated!

Fact remains: as soon as I open this folder in zed, some scala files get formatted and I get git diffs. I'm using sbt instead of bloop on because I never got bloop to work well for my projects. Now I'm on zed and my current settings look like:

"lsp": {
   "metals": {
     "settings": {
       "defaultBspToBuildTool": true,
       "inlayHints": {
         "inferredTypes": {
           "enable": false
         }
       },
       "binary": {
         "arguments": ["-Dmetals.http=on","-Dmetals.enableScalafmtOnBuild=false"]
       },
       "initialization_options": {
         "isHttpEnabled": true
       }
     }
   },

I just found that the root build.sbt does have:

scalafmtOnCompile := true,

so I shouldn't be surprised, but there seem to be some mishap about the .scalafmt settings then, because if I run sbt compile from my terminal on the monorepo, nothing happens — and it shouldn't. Lots of people work on this code with this same scalafmt file.

But it happens straight away as soon as I open zed on the folder, even without any open buffers.

I see now in the metals lsp logs that:

no build target found for /Users/viktor/[theproject]/build.sbt. Using presentation compiler with project's scala-library version: 3.3.3

We're using Scala 2.13.14

Then

...
Connected to Build server: sbt v1.10.4
…

2024.11.26 13:40:00 INFO  time: Imported build in 2.06s
2024.11.26 13:40:00 INFO  running doctor check
2024.11.26 13:40:00 INFO  java targets:
2024.11.26 13:40:00 WARN  Unable to run doctor. Make sure `isHttpEnabled` is set to `true`.

I thought I did that with

"initialization_options": {
"isHttpEnabled": true

Then:

…
2024.11.26 13:40:07 ERROR SemanticDB not found: build.sbt
scala.meta.internal.metals.ScalafixProvider$ScalafixRunException: SemanticDB not found: build.sbt

…

2024.11.26 13:42:07 INFO  scalafmt: Formatting 1 Scala sources (/Users/viktor/dev/[theproject]/[module])...

I think I had the same problem in vscode.

[tgodzik]

Wouldn't that be caused by scalafmtOnCompile := true, then? Maybe the scope is different, could it be that running from command line it only formats the changed files?

Does it format things if you do sbt compile?

[hedefalk]

Yes, I mean

scalafmtOnCompile := true

will cause it to format on compile (doh) but I was sure it didn't change it up unless metals. But I need to double check…

And aah,

no build target found for /Users/viktor/[theproject]/build.sbt. Using presentation compiler with project's scala-library version: 3.3.3

is a red herring, meaning only the meta build of the build.sbt file I guess.

[hedefalk]

Sorry, it seems now that sbt compile on the right submodules will actually cause these reformats to happen. Nothing about metals then! Thanks.