Adding languages

Submodules

To add a new langauge, you should first add a tree-sitter submodule. To do this, you can run the command

git submodule add -f <repository> helix-syntax/languages/tree-sitter-<name>

For example, to add tree-sitter-ocaml you would run

git submodule add -f https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-ocaml helix-syntax/languages/tree-sitter-ocaml

Make sure the submodule is shallow by doing

git config -f .gitmodules submodule.helix-syntax/languages/tree-sitter-<name>.shallow true

or you can manually add shallow = true to .gitmodules.

Next, you need to add the language to the languages.toml found in the root of the repository; this languages.toml file is included at compilation time, and is distinct from the language.toml file in the user's configuration directory.

These are the available keys and descriptions for the file.

Key	Description
name	The name of the language
scope	A string like `source.js` that identifies the language. Currently, we strive to match the scope names used by popular TextMate grammars and by the Linguist library. Usually `source.<name>` or `text.<name>` in case of markup languages
injection-regex	regex pattern that will be tested against a language name in order to determine whether this language should be used for a potential language injection site.
file-types	The filetypes of the language, for example `["yml", "yaml"]`
shebangs	The interpreters from the shebang line, for example `["sh", "bash"]`
roots	A set of marker files to look for when trying to find the workspace root. For example `Cargo.lock`, `yarn.lock`
auto-format	Whether to autoformat this language when saving
comment-token	The token to use as a comment-token
indent	The indent to use. Has sub keys `tab-width` and `unit`
config	Language server configuration

Queries

For a language to have syntax-highlighting and indentation among other things, you have to add queries. Add a directory for your language with the path runtime/queries/<name>/. The tree-sitter website gives more info on how to write queries.

Common Issues

If you get errors when building after switching branches, you may have to remove or update tree-sitter submodules. You can update submodules by running sh git submodule sync; git submodule update --init
Make sure to not use the --remote flag. To remove submodules look inside the .gitmodules and remove directories that are not present inside of it.
If a parser is segfaulting or you want to remove the parser, make sure to remove the submodule and the compiled parser in runtime/grammar/<name>.so
The indents query is indents.toml, not indents.scm. See this issue for more information.