Tree-sitter grammar development workflow

#1

Does anyone have any tips for developing tree-sitter grammars?

I was about to ask for actual error assistance, but it seems to have magically fixed itself (though it’ll probably break as soon as I touch it). I frequently get wrong NODE_MODULE_VERSION errors, which are a pain. Working on both the parser and how it runs in Atom at the same time seems impossible.

Should I have different versions of NodeJS installed or something? Am I able to develop the parser locally, and use this local version in the Atom package?

My current workflow is

  1. Make changes to tree-sitter parser and publish to NPM
  2. Delete the old version in node_modules in the Atom grammar package, and run apm install
  3. Hope it works.

There are also frequent bugs in the syntax highlighting. For example,

44%20pm
Screen Shot 2018-06-20 at 12.55.44 pm.png1800×374 40.5 KB

The comment should not look like a string. (using this tree-sitter grammar and the unpublished GitHub version of this Atom grammar). Having a closing brace there is illegal, and throws a MISSING when I run tree-sitter parse ..., but the syntax highlighting seems to have leaked.

/cc @maxbrunsfeld ?

#3

Hey @Aerijo, have you found a workflow that works? I keep running into the same NODE_MODULE_VERSION errors and find myself continually hoping for the best.

The gist you made was extremely helpful, thanks for putting that together!

#4

The Electron 3 upgrade was delayed due to unresolved crashes. Node 8.9.3 should work for all current versions of Atom.

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#5

Thank you @Aerijo! & your tip for using nvm for node versioning was key.