Finally got Auto Complete working in Helix

I have been using Helix as an editor, not as an IDE. One of the USP of Helix is LSP support out of the box

Recently, I’ve been programming in rust.

Helix is also written in rust.

So I think it is natural that they would support rust LSP rust-analyzer and it does.

But I wasn’t getting auto completions 😞

I had rust-analyzer installed (or so I thought) and helix health check also passed.

$ hx --health rust
Configured language servers:
  ✓ rust-analyzer: /home/mandar/.cargo/bin/rust-analyzer

Yet, I did not get auto-complete. helix log showed some error related to rust-analyzer not being there.

How can it be ?

Let us check if the file really exists.

$ file ~/.cargo/bin/rust-analyzer
/home/mandar/.cargo/bin/rust-analyzer: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 2.6.32, with debug_info, not stripped

OK, path listed by Helix health exists, and it is not a link. It is a proper ELF 64-bit binary.

Maybe permission issue, or something else 🤔

Let me try to run it without argument.

$ ~/.cargo/bin/rust-analyzer
error: Unknown binary 'rust-analyzer' in official toolchain 'stable-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu'.

What ??

This is same error listed by helix logs.

No wonder auto completons do not work.

After some searching, I found the solution 🎉

rustup component add rust-analyzer

But did I have rust-analyzer already in my ~/.cargo/bin

A kind soul on reddit pointed me to this issue.

As of this writing, the issue is still open. But it helps to know I’m not the only one with this issue 😌

Turns out I’ve already written about similar error but for Emacs here. Doh!