Ability to set cmd = "path/to/metals-bin"

[gvolpe]

Hi Chris,

I'd like to add nvim-metals support to my neovim-flake project.

I was wondering if there is something like lspconfig.metals.setup { cmd = "path/to/metals-bin"; }? The useGlobalExecutable option requires a global executable, which I'd like to avoid.

Thanks!

[ckipp01]

Hey @gvolpe! Thanks for the question!

The really short answer is sure, you can do the following:

local metals_config = require("metals").bare_config()
metals_config.cmd = { "whatever/you/want" }

However I don't actually document it. The reason for this is that nvim-metals actually also takes into account JAVA_OPTS, JAVA_FLAGS, your .jvmopts file and also anything you pass into metals_config.settings.serverProperties. It also then strips out certain ones that won't work with metals/coursier automatically and then passes them all in to Neovim to start the server. So if you override cmd you lose all of that, which is for sure not what most people want.

There is a useGlobalExecutable setting that is a boolean setting to use a global executable, but from what I understand this isn't desired. What we could do is make that setting a boolean|string and you can either turn it on or pass in a path where Metals is installed. Then it would still take all the jvm opts stuff into account, but still allow you to pass in a path. Would that work for your use case?

[gvolpe]

Thansk @ckipp01 !

I think losing all the environment variables stuff would be acceptable for people using Nix, as most would prefer a reproducible way to get those settings in.

But I'd say it would be nice if we could override metals_config.cmd while keeping metals_config.settings.serverProperties, I understand that wouldn't be the case now?

WRT useGlobalExecutable as boolean|string, I think that would be quite confusing, given the naming of that variable. If that's the road to get there, I'd vote for a new metalsBinaryPath or so that would take precedence.

[ckipp01]

#455