QUESTION: i cant add a new language

[amtoine]

hello there 👋

it's my first issue here and i have to admit i've been enjoying this new (to me) editor for a few days now and it's really cool 😋

my situation

currently, i'm an intern and i work on the Oberon programming language
it is one of the successors of pascal and modula 2 and shares a syntax very similar to pascal

however, neither modula and oberon are known to helix, which is quite expected 😉 😏

what works

i've been able to

sudo helix --grammar fetch
sudo helix --grammar build

which both now give me

Fetching 107 grammars
107 up to date git grammars

and

Building 107 grammars
107 grammars already built

respectively 👌

my problem

i tried, thanks to the Adding Languages and the Language sections of the documentation, to add a new language to my ~/.config/helix/languages.toml

[[language]]
name = "oberon"
scope = "source.oberon"
injection-regex = "oberon"
file-types = ["obn", "Mod", "mod"]
roots = []
comment-token = "(*"
indent = { tab-width = 4, unit = "  " }

[[grammar]]
name = "oberon"
source = { git = "https://github.com/Isopod/tree-sitter-pascal", rev = "2fd40f477d3e2794af152618ccfac8d92eb72a66" }

you can see the special extensions, the special comment token and i'm using the same grammar as pascal 👍

but now, when i run

sudo helix --grammar fetch
sudo helix --grammar build

i get the same 107 as before, and not 108 with oberon 😕

and when i try to build without sudo, it recognizes the new language

> hx --grammar build
Building 108 grammars
107 grammars already built
1 grammars failed to build
	Failure 0/1: Failed to read directory "/var/lib/helix/runtime/grammars/sources/oberon". Did you use 'hx --grammar fetch'?

but then, does not have the permissions to do anything...

> hx --grammar fetch
...
Failure 100/108: Could not create grammar directory "/var/lib/helix/runtime/grammars/sources/oberon"
...

what is happening? 😱

additional information

i'm using:

• ArchLinux version 5.19.10-arch1-1
• alacritty version 0.10.1
• nushell version 0.67.0
• helix version 22.08.1 (which is the latest i believe)

temporary workaround

i can simply extend the types of the pascal language with a simpler languages.toml file

[[language]]
name = "pascal"
file-types = ["pas", "pp", "inc", "lpr", "lfm", "obn", "mod", "Mod"]

it works fine but the oberon files are recognized as pascal source files and it's not very satisfying right? 😉

[kirawi]

Someone else may be able to address that issue, but you can alternatively specify:

[[language]]
# ...
grammar = "pascal"

to reuse the pascal grammar.

[amtoine]

okey, so i tried

[[language]]
name = "oberon"
scope = "source.oberon"
injection-regex = "oberon"
file-types = ["obn", "Mod", "mod"]
roots = []
comment-token = "(*"
indent = { tab-width = 4, unit = "  " }

[[grammar]]
name = "pascal"
source = { git = "https://github.com/Isopod/tree-sitter-pascal", rev = "2fd40f477d3e2794af152618ccfac8d92eb72a66" }

in languages.toml

then hx --grammar and sudo helix --grammar detect both only 107 languages 🤔

i did run

> sudo helix --grammar fetch; sudo helix --grammar build
Fetching 107 grammars
107 up to date git grammars
Building 107 grammars
107 grammars already built

but then

> hx --health | grep -e oberon -e LSP
Language         LSP              DAP              Highlight        Textobject       Indent
oberon           None             None             ✘                ✘                ✘  

and nothing in a .obn file apart the little oberon at the bottom right 😋

[kirawi]

You don't need the grammar stuff if you specify grammar under the languages block like I did.

[[language]]
name = "oberon"
scope = "source.oberon"
injection-regex = "oberon"
file-types = ["obn", "Mod", "mod"]
roots = []
comment-token = "(*"
indent = { tab-width = 4, unit = "  " }
grammar = "pascal"

[amtoine]

ooook i see the idea 👍

but then what do i need to do? 🤔
i have no syntax highlighting for now 😕

[the-mikedavis]

You will need to add a highlights.scm query file that says ; inherits: pascal. If you installed from source, that file would be ~/.config/helix/runtime/queries/oberon/highlights.scm. If you installed from a package manager though, you would either need to determine where the package manager put the other queries or switch to building from source. (There's an issue to improve that behavior #3346)

[amtoine]

thanks for that @the-mikedavis 🤩
fixed the issue 😮

i simply did run

sudo cp /var/lib/helix/runtime/queries/pascal/ /var/lib/helix/runtime/queries/oberon/

and it works fine now 😋

however, as you say in #3346, it's not very convenient having to interact with /var/ with sudo privileges all the time...

i'll build helix from source until a fix can be found 😉

thanks again 😌