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ELisp Tree-sitter

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For Emacs 29+, please use the built-in integration instead of this package.

This is an Emacs Lisp binding for tree-sitter, an incremental parsing library. It requires Emacs 25.1 or above, built with dynamic module support.

It aims to be the foundation for a new breed of Emacs packages that understand code structurally. For example:

  • Faster, fine-grained code highlighting.
  • More flexible code folding.
  • Structural editing (like Paredit, or even better) for non-Lisp code.
  • More informative indexing for imenu.

The author of tree-sitter articulated its merits a lot better in this Strange Loop talk.

Installation

See the installation section in the documentation.

If you want to hack on emacs-tree-sitter itself, see the next section instead.

Setup for Development

Note: On Windows, use Powershell instead of Bash or cmd.exe.

  • Clone this repo with the --recursive flag.
  • Add 3 of its directories to load-path: core/, lisp/ and langs/.
  • Install eask.
  • Run bin/setup.

If you want to hack on the high-level features (in Lisp) only:

  • Make changes to the .el files.
  • Add tests to tree-sitter-tests.el and run them with bin/test.

If you want to build additional (or all) grammars from source, or work on the core dynamic module, see the next 2 sections.

Building grammars from source

Note: If you are only interested in building the grammar binaries, not the dynamic module, check out tree-sitter-langs.

  • Install NodeJS. It is needed to generate the grammar code from the JavaScript DSL. The recommended tool to manage NodeJS is volta.
  • Install tree-sitter CLI tool: (Its binary can also be downloaded directly from GitHub.) Note: version 0.20+ cannot be used, as they introduced a breaking change in binary storage location. 
    # For yarn user
yarn global add tree-sitter-cli@0.19.3

# For npm user
npm install -g tree-sitter-cli@0.19.3
  • Run langs/script/compile. For example: 
    langs/script/compile rust

Working on the dynamic module

  • Install the Rust toolchain.
  • Build: 
    bin/build
  • Test: 
    bin/test
  • Continuously rebuild and test on change (requires cargo-watch): 
    bin/test watch

To test against a different version of Emacs, set the environment variable EMACS (e.g. EMACS=/snap/bin/emacs make test).

Alternatives

Contribution

Contributions are welcomed. Please take a look at the issue list for ideas, or create a new issue to describe any idea you have for improvement.

For language-specific issues/features, please check out tree-sitter-langs instead.

Show respect and empathy towards others. Both technical empathy and general empathy are highly valued.