nvim-treesitter VS tree-sitter

Compare nvim-treesitter vs tree-sitter and see what are their differences.

nvim-treesitter

Nvim Treesitter configurations and abstraction layer (by nvim-treesitter)

tree-sitter

An incremental parsing system for programming tools (by tree-sitter)
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nvim-treesitter tree-sitter
310 72
11,922 20,605
2.4% 2.8%
9.8 9.8
1 day ago 4 days ago
Tree-sitter Query Rust
Apache License 2.0 MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

nvim-treesitter

Posts with mentions or reviews of nvim-treesitter. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-03-12.

tree-sitter

Posts with mentions or reviews of tree-sitter. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-05-06.
  • Decoding Tree-sitter Playground Output For Fun
    1 project | dev.to | 9 May 2025
    Paste this into the Playground (try it here). Youโ€™ll get something like:
  • Diving into Tree-Sitter: Parsing Code with Python Like a Pro
    2 projects | dev.to | 6 May 2025
    This code sets up a parser for Python code. The tree-sitter-python package provides a precompiled grammar, so no manual compilation is needed. If youโ€™re targeting another language, check for its grammar package on Tree-Sitter Wiki.
  • Making Sense of tree-sitter's C API
    1 project | dev.to | 5 May 2025
    The API is defined in tree_sitter/api.h (available on GitHub). It revolves around a few key concepts: parsers, trees, nodes, and queries. Letโ€™s dive into the essentials.
  • Want AI to Actually Understand Your Code? This Tool Says It Can Help
    2 projects | dev.to | 23 Mar 2025
    Tree-sitter is a parser generator tool and an incremental parsing library, it is available in Rust ๐Ÿฆ€ - GitHub. CocoIndex has built-in Rust integration with Tree-sitter to efficiently parse code and extract syntax trees for various programming languages.
  • Emacs Tree-sitter custom highlighting
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Mar 2025
    I think the main problem is that highligthing framework used by tree-sitter (https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/tree/master/highl...) is not easily pluggable into emacs font-lock-mode.
  • Highlighting Parts of Lua as Bash
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Jan 2025
    Although I am not certain if tree-sitter allows matching on comments, but https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/issues/1138 seems to imply that it does
  • I wrote my own "proper" programming language
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jan 2025
    Hard agree. Even without going deep on a "serious language" there's a universe of DSLs that's mostly unexplored.

    Debuggers are the outlier in your group but there's not exactly a void for those other wishes. As just one slice, building a tree-sitter [1] grammar gives the basis for good editor integration [2], formatters [3], structural diff [4] and other dev tools. Similarly if you're expressing some form of program, mapping to LLVM IR connects your creation with a fairly extensive compiler toolchain.

    Language agnostic tooling exists, but there still needs to be some abstraction layer.

    [1]: https://tree-sitter.github.io/

    [2]: https://zed.dev/blog/syntax-aware-editing

    [3]: https://topiary.tweag.io

    [4]: https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk

  • Tbsp โ€“ treesitter-based source processing language
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Sep 2024
    For those that want to explore the grammars listed at https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/wiki/List-of-pars... in a more friendly railroad diagram format I made https://mingodad.github.io/plgh/json2ebnf.html that reads the "src/grammar.json" and try it's best to generate an EBNF understood by (IPV6) https://www.bottlecaps.de/rr/ui or (IPV4) https://rr.red-dove.com/ui where we get a nice navigable railroad diagram (see https://github.com/GuntherRademacher/rr for offline usage).
  • Pragtical: The practical and pragmatic code editor
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Aug 2024
    https://github.com/pragtical/plugins/commit/54096a6461f5c034... makes me long for The One Grammar To Rule Them โ„ข

    I thought for a while that TextMate bundles[1] were that, especially since JetBrains[2], Linguist[3] and VSCode[4] honor them. However, in the spirit of "the good thing about standards ..." highlight.js does[5] almost the same thing that Pragtical does which makes me feel even worse

    I had high hopes for Tree-Sitter since it seems to have really won mindshare, but the idea of having an executable grammar spec[6] is ... well, no wonder it hasn't caught on outside of that specific ecosystem

    1: https://github.com/rspec/rspec.tmbundle/blob/1.1.12/Syntaxes...

    2: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/24...

    3: https://github.com/github-linguist/linguist/blob/v7.30.0/lib...

    4: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-textmate

    5: https://github.com/highlightjs/highlight.js/blob/11.10.0/src...

    6: https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/blob/v0.22.6/test...

  • Rust for Filesystems
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jul 2024
    If you like to see some examples of C bindings:

    https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/blob/25c718918084...

What are some alternatives?

When comparing nvim-treesitter and tree-sitter you can also consider the following projects:

coc.nvim - Nodejs extension host for vim & neovim, load extensions like VSCode and host language servers.

PHP Parser - A PHP parser written in PHP

vim-polyglot - A solid language pack for Vim.

sourcegraph - Code AI platform with Code Search & Cody

packer.nvim - A use-package inspired plugin manager for Neovim. Uses native packages, supports Luarocks dependencies, written in Lua, allows for expressive config

language-server-protocol - Defines a common protocol for language servers.

InfluxDB โ€“ Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
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SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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