ast-grep VS ssr.nvim

This article illustrates the usage of ast-grep, a tool designed to locate and substitute patterns in your codebase, towards easing your migration to React 19.

This looks great, thanks for building and sharing it.

Interested folks may also want to check out ast-grep:

https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep

ast-grep is a command-line tool that lets you search and transform code written in many programming languages using abstract syntax trees (ASTs). ASTs are data structures that capture the syntactic and semantic structure of source code. With ast-grep, you can write patterns as if you are writing ordinary code, and it will match all code that has the same syntactical structure. And if you need more power, you can use YAML, a rule system that allows you to write more sophisticated linting rules or code modifications.

I really like this - it means the tool is available to people with familiarity of any of those four distribution mechanisms.

You can also download pre-built binaries from their releases page: https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep/releases/tag/0.14.2

On top of that, they offer API bindings for it in three different languages:

- Rust (not yet stable): https://docs.rs/ast-grep-core/latest/ast_grep_core/

- JavaScript/TypeScript: https://ast-grep.github.io/guide/api-usage/js-api.html

- Python: https://ast-grep.github.io/guide/api-usage/py-api.html

It's rare to see a tool/library offer this depth of language support out of the box.

Is there an open source library that does this? Maybe something on top of ast-grep

There is also a neovim plugin doing structural search/replace, also based on treesitter: https://github.com/cshuaimin/ssr.nvim

This is not a totally new idea. JetBrains has a well-known article to introduce Structural Search and Replace and its usage in IDEs. Unsurprisingly, NeoVim community also has a plugin called ssr.nvim. But telescope-sg integrates the power of ast-grep's structural search with our beloved fuzzy finder telescope.nvim. That's the merit I think worth a Reddit post: everything will work like Luna-watching NeoVimmers are used to!

Level 1, syntactic search and replace. The user specifies input pattern as Zig syntax with some placeholders and the desired output likewise. The compiler in parallel matches all source files and does the transformation where there is syntactic match. These days, I think this should be pretty universally available via tree sitter (https://github.com/cshuaimin/ssr.nvim) ? Still totally worth it to have first-class support.

Checkout ssr.nvim https://github.com/cshuaimin/ssr.nvim

PS: The video in the post (with Ruby's do vs {}) -- that I watched before I read what the plugin actually does -- reminded me of the structural search-and-replace plugin someone presented a while ago on this subreddit.