Variable substitution support in LTeX settings

[leolavaur]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I'm a Nix/NixOS user and I heavily rely on development shells (a way to start a shell session with $PATH and other environment variables populated to access a specific set of programs and/or configurations). Tools such as LTeX are installed and made available in these shells, but their path is dynamic, and therefore I cannot set a deterministic path to the ltex-ls language server that is packaged in Nixpkgs (the Nix package repository).

What I can do is set an environment variable in my shell session (loaded in VSCode) containing the path to ltex-ls, and use VSCode variable substitution to specify the setting ltex.ltex-ls.path using the environment variable, but it does not work.

Describe the solution you'd like
Variable substitution support in the settings, so I can do : "ltex.ltex-ls.path": "${env:MY_VAR_WITH_LTEX_PATH}" in my workspace settings.

Describe alternatives you've considered
I considered other ways of setting up the extension, but none seemed to work:

• using "ltex.ltex-ls.path": "ltex-ls" to use the binary available in $PATH directly, but it looks like this setting has to point to a directory.
• settings up a bash script in my workspace that simply calls "ltex-ls" and tried to point to this script, but the same issue as above arise.
• set $JAVA_HOME using my shell session to point to a Java installation made with Nix, but the extension does not detect it automatically.

Additional context
Relevant links:

• https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/variables-reference
• https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=23.05&show=ltex-ls&from=0&size=50&sort=relevance&type=packages&query=ltex

[David-Kopczynski]

Would love to see the extension just looking up ltex-ls, essentially removing the need for any paths. However, one workaround could be a symlink using a known path and the path provided by Nix. Sadly, it seems like my ltex-ls installation wont even start correctly (with and without an additional Java installation) using the path from the /nix/store/....