tree-sitter-elisp VS tree-sitter-comment

Here is the tree-sitter grammar of Elisp:

https://github.com/Wilfred/tree-sitter-elisp/blob/main/gramm... (approx. 200 lines)

and here is the grammar of JavaScript:

https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-javascript/blob/m... (approx. 1200 lines)

JavaScript evolved into a language of similar complexity as Perl 5 (the corresponding tree sitter syntax table counts almost 2000 lines, currently).

> I like the multiprocess approach with standard protocols, despite its complexities, because it lets different editors share smarts.

Yes, the benefit LSP brings is putting editors/IDEs on equal footing with respect to a specific language. Also the multiplicative effect when the author of a new language provides a language server so nobody needs to switch their IDEs to try it out.

However, seeing how „straight forward“ a tree-sitter specific language grammar looks in practice (1) makes we wonder if by providing a TS grammar for a language would realize (almost) the same benefit. Based on such a grammar and TS’ selector engine figuring out a syntax highlighting scheme, code folder, a docstring or symbol scanner might not be such a huge endeavor any more as you described for ENSIME.

So, yeah, in the end LSP might be dead end at some point, especially because TS promises to be very fast and avoids any IPC. Performance seems to be the biggest problem of LSP clients in Emacs and probably other editors as well.

(1) https://github.com/Wilfred/tree-sitter-elisp/blob/main/gramm... — of course, the example being ELISP makes it look easier than said, if you compare it with the grammar of Perl5 that’s not yet finished unsurprisingly.

As far as I know there is currently no treesitter parser for Doxygen style comments. There is a language agnostic comment parser that is supported by nvim-treesitter that will highlight things like TODO: and NOTE: in comments. Until this recent commit nvim-treesitter provided a query for this parser that highlighted @ text in comments. It was meant to highlight a reference to a user but it doubled as a doxygen tag highlight for me for a while. I just noticed that this query has been removed and I'm not sure why but you can add it as a custom query in your Neovim config. I have yet to try this so you'll have to refer to the Neovim treesitter docs for where to add the query.

I'm not sure how to use this in Emacs, but there's also a tree-sitter grammar specifically for comment blocks, including TODOs: https://github.com/stsewd/tree-sitter-comment

you mean this one? https://github.com/stsewd/tree-sitter-comment

The reason I implemented this is because of the slow performance of tree-sitter-comment in large files. Treesitter will inject the comment language for every line comment, which is far from ideal. I've disabled the comment parser, but still wanted to see @something highlighted in Lua comments.

The right most window shows the code I want to query. This is a .cpp file, so the main-language is C++. For highlighting the two comments, I'm using tree-sitter-comment. This plugin injects the comment-language. I want to query all tag nodes from this injected language, but this query does not work.

You can install this parser for treesitter which highlights comments :)