helix/book/src/guides/adding_languages.md

Adding languages

Language configuration

To add a new language, you need to add a [[language]] entry to the languages.toml (see the language configuration section).

When adding a new language or Language Server configuration for an existing language, run cargo xtask docgen to add the new configuration to the Language Support docs before creating a pull request. When adding a Language Server configuration, be sure to update the Language Server Wiki with installation notes.

Grammar configuration

If a tree-sitter grammar is available for the language, add a new [[grammar]] entry to languages.toml.

You may use the source.path key rather than source.git with an absolute path to a locally available grammar for testing, but switch to source.git before submitting a pull request.

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 supersedes the ones before it. See this issue for an example.

Common Issues

• If you get errors when running after switching branches, you may have to update the tree-sitter grammars. Run hx --grammar fetch to fetch the grammars and hx --grammar build to build any out-of-date grammars.

• If a parser is segfaulting or you want to remove the parser, make sure to remove the compiled parser in runtime/grammar/<name>.so