I am using Zed editor especially the Vim mode for quite some time. VSCode editor was my previous editor. The experience on VSCode was laggy and slow using VSCodeVim. I’ll blame my machine for that, rather than my not-so-great Vim skills.

I quite like the Camouflage VSCode extension by zeybek. This extension hides the sensitive environment variables in the .env file by hiding their values. No more “oops” moment.

This seems like a perfect opportunity to learn Rust - Create a similar extension for Zed editor.

Project code: https://github.com/dudeperf3ct/zed-camouflage

After looking around, I found out that slash command approach should be used to implement this. The idea being adding /mask slash command, the contents of .env file would be masked.

The assistant panel in Zed is not intuitive. I had to click aimlessly to find “Assistant panel” where slash commands can be inserted.

The assistant panel is located at the bottom right (or shortcut Ctrl + ?). In there click on the + followed by “New Text Thread” (or shortcut ctrl + alt + n).

Attempt 1: Slash command run_slash_command

The steps would be

impl zed::Extension for CamouflageExtension {
    fn run_slash_command(...) {
        // read file using worktree
        // masked = mask_env_contents(&contents)
        // return SlashCommandOutput{text: masked, sections: vec![]}
    }
}
  1. Read the contents of .env file
  2. Parse and mask the contents of the file
  3. Write the output to the file .env

The problem with above is

  1. Worktree do not contain the files of current working directory.
  2. SlashCommandOutput returns output as a text field in the panel itself.

Attempt 2: Abandon Worktree and pass the contents of .env as arguments to slash command and then perform masking

impl zed::Extension for CamouflageExtension {

    fn run_slash_command(...) -> ... {
        match command.name.as_str() {
            "mask" => self.handle_mask_command(args),
            _ => Err(format!("Unknown command: {}", command.name)),
        }
    }
}

impl CamouflageExtension {
    fn handle_mask_command(&self, args: Vec<String>) -> ... {
        // Check if args empty
        // Join all args into single string
        // Mask the content
        // Return masked output
    } 
}

This worked but that’s not what I wanted. You have to navigate to “Assistant panel” and type /mask command with contents of .env, lol.

/mask API_KEY=secret123

Output

🔒 Masked Environment Variables:

API_KEY=***MASKED***

Looks like there’s a similar open issue asking for the same: How to read file contents in a custom slash command? #17714.

Extensions run inside of the Wasm sandbox and can currently only perform arbitrary file I/O within the extension working directory.