Getting Svelte Inspector Working with Neovim

Svelte Inspector

Ilja’s Day 8 of Advent of Svelte called the Svelte Inspector a “vastly underrated DX boost” and it reminded me this feature existed. When I first switched to Neovim, I really wanted this - press a keyboard shortcut, click any element in your browser, and it opens the corresponding component at the exact line and column.

I found Theo Steiner’s deep-dive about getting it working with Neovim via RPC sockets, but it required maintaining a bash script that parsed process IDs and matched working directories. I didn’t want to maintain that at a scripting level, so I just got better at telescope and live grep instead.

But Ilja’s post inspired me to go back to it, and I found nasso had rewritten the solution in Rust.

The Smart Solution

Every Neovim instance automatically creates an RPC socket. The tool finds all running Neovim sockets, checks which one’s working directory is the closest ancestor to the file being opened, and sends a remote command to that specific instance.

No new processes, no swapfile conflicts, no bash scripts to maintain.

The Setup

arch.btw

cargo install --locked launch-editor-nvim

config.fish

set -gx LAUNCH_EDITOR launch-editor-nvim

svelte.config.js

vitePlugin: {
  inspector: {
    toggleKeyCombo: "alt-x",
    showToggleButton: "always",
    toggleButtonPos: "bottom-right",
  },
}

In Action

The Gotcha

The dev server needs the LAUNCH_EDITOR environment variable. After adding it to Fish config, source it or start a new terminal before restarting your dev server.

Now I have the best of both worlds - telescope for most navigation, but sometimes clicking is just easier.

note: The inspector is great when you’re not familiar with the codebase.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

This solution exists because:

Theo Steiner wrote the original deep-dive explaining how to wire up Neovim RPC sockets to the Svelte Inspector using bash
nasso took that concept and built a proper Rust implementation that anyone can install via cargo
Joy of Code documented the basic inspector setup for VS Code users that I originally used