Better Highlight with Neovim Treesitter

[EduardoAraujoB]

Problem

Neovim 0.5 comes with treesitter, a plugin that improves a lot the syntax highlighting as described in the repository, but by using it with higlight enabled, I got weird higlights for some groups in TSX/JSX (in JS/TS files it works fine)

What happened

What I expected to happen

on my vscode, I got this

Machine Info

• NVIM v0.5.0-dev
• OS: Ubuntu 20.04
• Terminal: Tilix with Tmux
• TERM: xterm-256color

Additional Info

my neovim configs

[benknoble]

Well, there's always been disparity between VS Code and (Neo)Vim because of the different syntax engines. I too hope that tree-sitters in neovim will bring an improvement to this. (Aside: do you know if anyone has put the work in for vim to coordinate tree-sitters or similar with text-properties?)

At any rate, it's not clear what the issue is—are you saying that tree-sitter and our colorscheme are somehow clashing? We define highlight groups, no syntax stuff, so I'm not sure how that could happen.

[EduardoAraujoB]

@benknoble treesitter comes with new highlight groups which vim doesn't recognize, the problem that I'm having is to make dracula nvim work properly with this new groups on TSX/JSX, currently it doesn't show different higlights for variables, functions and JSX props, when the highlight is enabled by doing this lua require'nvim-treesitter.configs'.setup { highlight = { enable = true } } on my init.vim, it changes the way that nvim handles highlight groups, enabling that blue color for type definitions, but for some reason it doesn't work properly on the other cases that I showed, because the colorscheme doesn't give full support for nvim treesitter

[benknoble]

I think I understand. The simplest fix is probably to continue to add more highlighting groups (see the section in colors/dracula.vim under has('nvim') with the Lsp* stuff). Feel free to submit a PR, or point us towards more resources on how to implement this.

[dsifford]

Also just FYI: I personally don't have any plans to support this until this feature makes it to an actual release.

Tree-sitter is currently only available in nightly and I don't think it's wise to get too carried away supporting nightly build features as they are subject to change at any time.

[EduardoAraujoB]

@dsifford Neovim nightly is planned to release soon, but if it doesn't make sense for the project by now, I can just close the issue

[benknoble]

I think it's fine to leave the issue be as the "tree-sitter integration tracker." But it may not get much progress until the official release comes (which I had also heard was soon).

[EduardoAraujoB]

neovim 0.5 released today, I told that it was soon 🙂

[benknoble]

Based on https://neovim.io/doc/user/treesitter.html#lua-treesitter-highlight, the syntax feature is still experimental?

And it looks like you use TreeSitter queries to map parts of the buffer to highlight groups.

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I'm happy to support more "standard" groups for NeoVim's tree-sitter, but I don't see any documented there. Of course, I'm no expert on the feature. It would be helpful for someone who understands it to take point on improvements here. That leaves us in "if someone is willing to work on it" territory, unfortunately.

[dsifford]

I'm looking into this a bit further now that 0.5.0 has landed.

Looks like the way to get tree-sitter syntax as of right now is via https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter

Let me kick the tires a bit on this and then we can prob get something together for it. Likely after the holiday weekend.

[dsifford]

Ok I've played around with it for the last day or two and I'm not sure I feel comfortable right this moment supporting it specifically because nvim-treesitter is the entity right now that dictates highlight groups.

When the feature fully lands in neovim, these highlight groups may or may not be translated. So it feels premature to build up support for these groups in the meantime.

[dsifford]

That all said, it's pretty darn close by default to the correct scheme. There's just edge cases sprinkled throughout.

[benknoble]

Yeah, that plugin (?) now says experimental until 0.6.0. There is some built-in support, but maybe it's not "the whole package"?

[EduardoAraujoB]

I'm not sure about when and how treesitter will be included in neovim by default, but about the edge cases, some of them I figured out that it's related to parsing issues, anyway, if it doesn't make sense for the project right now, feel free to close the issue and we can open a new one when treesitter gets more stable

[adriantrunzo]

As far as I can tell, the highlight groups that would need to be supported are documented here. It seems like adding more groups to this existing block would probably solve the issue, at least judging by other color schemes that claim to support treesitter.

I'd be happy to help out on this issue, though I wouldn't know how to choose the appropriate color for each group. Is there some "standard" example of dracula syntax highlighting that we would need to mirror?

Edit: Now I see the default linking mentioned above.

[benknoble]

Thanks @adriantrunzo, that's really useful information to have