Hyperlinks — ZedExt

Hyperlinks (Zed extension)

Automatically turn text into clickable links based on regex patterns, inspired by the VS Code extension dlevs/vscode-pattern-links.

For example, turn ISSUE-123 into a link to your issue tracker, or #42 into a link to a GitHub issue.

How it works

Zed renders links returned by language servers via the LSP textDocument/documentLink request (supported by Zed since mid-2026, enabled by default). This extension runs a small language server that scans open documents for your configured regex rules and returns a link for each match.

The language server lives in a separate repository, krawitzzZ/zed-hyperlinks-server, and is published to npm as hyperlinks-lsp. On first use the extension installs the latest package version via Zed's npm APIs and runs it with Zed's bundled Node.

Cmd-click (macOS) / Ctrl-click (Linux/Windows) a match to open the link.

The server also reports a custom hyperlink semantic token for every match, which you can style to make matches visually stand out. See Highlighting below.

Requirements

A recent version of Zed with LSP document link support.
Network access on first use (to install the language server from npm); afterwards it is cached.

Installation (dev extension)

Clone this repository.
In Zed, open the command palette and run zed: install dev extension (or use the Install Dev Extension button on the Extensions page), then select this directory.

Zed compiles the Rust/WASM part automatically.

Configuration

There is no per-extension settings UI in Zed, so rules are configured through the language server's workspace settings in your settings.json, under the hyperlinkRules array:

{
  "lsp": {
    "hyperlinks": {
      "settings": {
        "hyperlinkRules": [
          {
            "linkPattern": "ISSUE-\\d+",
            "linkTarget": "https://myorg.atlassian.net/browse/$0"
          },
          {
            "linkPattern": "#(\\d+)",
            "linkTarget": "https://github.com/my-org/my-repo/issues/$1",
            "languages": ["markdown", "plaintext"]
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

These are forwarded via language_server_workspace_configuration (and then workspace/didChangeConfiguration). Optional initialization_options under the same lsp.hyperlinks key are forwarded separately if you ever need them.

Rule fields

Field	Required	Description
`linkPattern`	yes	A regular expression used to find text to turn into links, e.g. `ISSUE-\\d+`.
`linkTarget`	yes	The link template. `$0` is the whole match, `$1`, `$2`, ... are capture groups. Use `\$` for a literal `$`.
`linkPatternFlags`	no	Extra JavaScript regex flags, e.g. `i` (case-insensitive) or `s` (dot matches newlines). The `g` flag is always applied.
`languages`	no	List of LSP `languageId` strings to restrict the rule to (e.g. `["markdown", "plaintext"]`). If omitted/empty, the rule applies to all.

Highlighting

Zed does not visually style document links on its own, so by default a match is clickable but looks like ordinary text. To make matches stand out, the language server emits an LSP semantic token of the custom type hyperlink for every match (multi-line matches are split into one token per line, as LSP requires).

Zed styles semantic tokens through semantic_token_rules. To highlight hyperlinks, do two things in your settings.json:

Enable semantic tokens (they are off by default) by setting semantic_tokens to "combined" (keep tree-sitter highlighting and overlay semantic tokens) or "full". You can set this globally or per-language.
Add a rule matching the hyperlink token type under global_lsp_settings.semantic_token_rules.

{
  "semantic_tokens": "combined",
  "global_lsp_settings": {
    "semantic_token_rules": [
      {
        "token_type": "hyperlink",
        "underline": true,
        "foreground_color": "#4c9df3"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Instead of a hardcoded color you can reference theme styles, e.g. "style": ["link_uri", "link_text"]; the first style found in your theme is used. See the rule structure for all available properties (background_color, font_weight, strikethrough, ...).

Changing the semantic_tokens mode may require restarting the language server (editor: restart language server) to take effect.

Supported languages

Zed requires extension language servers to declare the languages they attach to (there is no "all files" wildcard). The languages are enumerated in extension.toml and currently cover Plain Text, Markdown, and a range of common programming languages. Add more entries there if you need others.

License

MIT