ssr.nvim VS pfff

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.

Hi, ast-grep author here. This is a great question and I asked this in the first place before I started the hobby project.

TLDR; I designed ast-grep to be on different tracks than semgrep.

Semgrep is for security and ast-grep is for development.

First and foremost, I have always been in awe of semgrep. Semgrep's documentation, product sites and Padioleau's podcast all gave me a lot of inspiration. Using code to find code is such a cool idea that I never need to craft an intricate regex or write a lengthy AST program. sgrep and patch from https://github.com/facebookarchive/pfff/wiki/Sgrep have helped me a lot in real large codebases.

When I used semgrep as a software engineer, instead of a security researcher, I found semgrep has not touched too much on routine development works. I can use `semgrep -e PATTERN` but the Python wrapper is not too fast compared to grep.

Meta/Facebook are long time OCaml users, their logo is on the OCaml website. Their static analysis tool and its predecessor are both written in OCaml.

Over the decades, there's been so very many attempts to address this conundrum; and yet, ...