Hi everyone,

I’m trying to use Zed for Elixir development and recently enabled the expert settings, but I’m not confident my setup is actually working.

The Elixir LSP seems to get stuck showing “Starting Erlang node” repeatedly, as you can see in the attached screenshot, and never fully comes up.

Brave Browser 2026-01-13 09.27.22680×452 46 KB

I’d really appreciate help from anyone who’s successfully using Zed with Elixir. In particular:

• Which LSP are you using? (expert, elixir-ls, etc.)
• Any must-have expert settings for Elixir that aren’t obvious from the docs?
• Common gotchas or pitfalls you ran into early on (and how you fixed them)

Here’s the my current Zed settings.

{
  "agent": {
    "default_model": {
      "provider": "zed.dev",
      "model": "claude-sonnet-4",
    },
    "always_allow_tool_actions": true,
    "model_parameters": [],
    "default_profile": "write",
  },
  "ui_font_size": 16,
  "buffer_font_size": 16,
  "theme": {
    "mode": "system",
    "light": "One Light",
    "dark": "One Dark",
  },
  "formatter": "language_server",
  "languages": {
    "Elixir": {
      "language_servers": [
        "expert",
        "!elixir-ls",
        "!next-ls",
        "!lexical",
        "tailwindcss-language-server",
      ],
    },
    "HEEX": {
      "language_servers": [
        "expert",
        "!elixir-ls",
        "!next-ls",
        "!lexical",
        "tailwindcss-language-server",
      ],
    },
  },
}

Thanks in advance!