helix - Unnamed repository; edit this file 'description' to name the repository.


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Adding languages
Submodules
To add a new language, 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.
languages.toml
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


diagnostic-severity
Minimal severity of diagnostic for it to be displayed. (Allowed values: Error, Warning, Info, Hint)


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.

NOTE: When evaluating queries, the first matching query takes
precedence, which is different from other editors like neovim where
the last matching query supercedes the ones before it. See
this issue for an example.

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.