IDE Integration

Astro Editor is built for writing, not coding, but sometimes you need to jump into a proper code editor — to tweak a component, fix a build, or edit something Astro Editor deliberately hides. Configure your editor once and Astro Editor can hand a file, a collection, or the whole project straight over to it.

Configuring your IDE

Set your IDE Command in the General preferences ( Command + Comma Cmd, Control + Comma Ctrl, Command + Comma Cmd, ). This is the command Astro Editor runs to launch your editor. If your editor’s command-line launcher is on your PATH, the name alone is enough:

• code for Visual Studio Code
• cursor for Cursor
• subl for Sublime Text
• zed for Zed

Otherwise, give the full path to the executable (e.g. /usr/local/bin/nvim). A leading ~/ is expanded to your home directory.

Once a command is set, the “Open in IDE” features below become available. Until then, they stay hidden.

Keep it to a single command

The IDE Command must be a single executable — a name or a path, with no extra arguments or flags. code works, but code --reuse-window does not, because the whole string is treated as the name of one program. Astro Editor runs it directly rather than through a shell, so shell features like &&, |, and ; won’t work either, and the path being opened is checked for unsafe characters first.

Opening from the context menu

With an IDE configured, right-clicking a file in the sidebar adds an Open in IDE item that opens that file directly in your editor.

Opening from the command palette

The command palette ( Command + P CmdP Control + P CtrlP Command + P CmdP ) gains three commands when an IDE is configured:

Command	Opens
Open File in IDE	The file you’re currently editing
Open Collection in IDE	The folder for the current collection
Open Project in IDE	The entire project