Leo Borai | Rust Software Engineer

I have been using Zed for a long time now, I love how performant and extensible it is as a IDE. Most of the code I write nowadays is Rust, then I also write TypeScript and Svelte.

However I happened to need to write some Java recently, before around 2016 I used NetBeans as my primary IDE for Java. But I’m so used to Zed that I want to continue using it for Java.

Install the OpenJDK

The OpenJDK is the open source implementation of the Java Runtime. It allows you to build and run Java applications. On macOS, the easiest way to install it is via Homebrew.

brew install openjdk

Then update your ...rc file to include the OpenJDK binaries in your PATH.

export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/openjdk/bin:$PATH"
export CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/homebrew/opt/openjdk/include"

Remember to save the file and also run source ~/.zshrc or source ~/.bashrc to apply the changes to your current terminal session.

Install Java Extension for Zed

Open Zed, go to the Extensions view and install the Java extension.

https://zed.dev/extensions/java

This extension provides support for Java language features, including syntax highlighting and LSP.

Create a Project

As I’m not a regular Java user, I will create a simple project using Maven through Docker.

For this I ran the following command to create an alias for mvn so that it runs inside the container but mounts the current directory as a volume, so that the files are created in the host machine.

alias mvn='docker run -it --rm -v "$(pwd)":/usr/src/app -w /usr/src/app maven:3.9.11 mvn'

Finally I created the project as:

mvn 
    archetype:generate 
    -DgroupId=com.company.app 
    -DartifactId=hello-world 
    -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart 
    -DarchetypeVersion=1.5 
    -DinteractiveMode=false

You can build the project with Maven as well:

mvn package

And finally execute it with:

mvn exec:java -Dexec.mainClass="com.company.app.App"

Its important to note that all of this Java code is actually running inside the Docker container, you might find issues with running GUI applications, but for console applications this works fine.

Conclusion

Now you have a working Java environment on macOS using Zed as your main IDE. You can create, build and run Java projects easily.