Tree-sitter is an incremental parsing system that allows developers to add syntax highlighting and tree-sitter regex search for easy navigation.

The project is heavily used among popular editors such as neovim, and helix.

The issue§

As a volunteer packager for openSUSE, I read rpm specfiles to add, update, and/or modify a package. It was fine with neovim at first but I use helix now as my main editor for modifying specfiles and for doing some changes.

A comparison between helix right and neovim left:

As you can see from the image above, helix does not have a syntax highlighter for rpm. Neovim and Vim do but they do not use tree-sitter for the highlighting of code. I am no expert of how neovim and vim do that without tree-sitter but I can link you to a blog which summarizes how it works by implementing syntax highlighting for Bril.

This poses a problem§

Well... for me, not sure for other people. The role of syntax highlighting is to allow us to see each part of the syntax differently e.g. function, module, variable, etcetera. This increases readability and the time to recognize parts of code is lessened to an extent. Although, it is not a big deal in most cases because RPM specfiles are usually less than 200 lines, it gets too complicated for packaging software that have different needs and limitations e.g. julia, and rust. Check out the specfiles for julia and rust and you will see what I mean.

Solution§

Again, I mainly use helix now as my main editor. And helix does not have the same syntax highlighting functionality like vim's or neovim's. It uses tree-sitter to do the syntax highlighting. Therefore, I have taken the initiative to write an RPM grammar for tree-sitter to solve my problems reading specfiles. For now the project is an empty repository - https://codeberg.org/uncomfyhalomacro/tree-sitter-rpm.

I will update later in the future blogs on the progress of this. It's my first time writing a grammar for tree-sitter after all. 😁