where are the grammar files fetched and buil[t]?

[amtoine]

hello there 👋 😋

i could not find a discussion on that very topic, hope i'm not creating a duplicate here 😌

my current setup

i have switched from the community package on ArchLinux to the "build from source" method, mainly to avoid messing around with either /var/lib/helix/ or /usr/lib/helix/ which both require sudo privileges...
i've ran the following, according to the documentation 👌

git clone https://github.com/helix-editor/helix
cd helix
cargo install --path helix-term

now i have hx available in $CARGO_HOME/bin/ 👌

i've even been able to cp all the runtime to ~/.config/helix/runtime/ and (1) get back my dracula theme and (2) add pascal's syntax highlighting for the oberon language as introduced in #4128 🤩
just had to run

cp -r ~/.config/helix/runtime/queries/pascal/ ~/.config/helix/runtime/queries/oberon/

my actual question

everything seems to work fine for now but i do not understand the following

> hx --grammar fetch; hx --grammar build
Fetching 114 grammars
114 up to date git grammars
Building 114 grammars
114 grammars already built

where are these grammars files fetched and built to? 🤔

i could not find any "helix" directory in /usr/share/, /usr/lib/ nor /var/lib/
nothing seems to have changed in my ~/.config/helix/runtime/
it gives me the same output even when removing the source repository 😕

[Ordoviz]

You can find the compiled tree-sitter grammars in ~/.config/helix/runtime/grammars. Are you asking out of curiosity or do you want to solve a specific problem?

[Ordoviz]

is it possible to see the paths helix is using when invoking hx --grammar for instance?

You can prepend strace to any command to see which syscalls it is making (interacting with the file system requires syscalls). You might have to pacman -S strace first.

[amtoine]

oooooh that is nice to know 😮
thanks 😋

[amtoine]

i was more thinking about some output in stdout 🤔

for instance, print xxx / xxx: fetching grammar for xxx for each language and the same with building
and maybe giving the path used direcly in the output of both grammar fetch and grammar build 😕
'cause strace is full of information, but honestly quite hard to read for beginners and on a daily basis when trying to fetch and build some grammars 😮

would the helix team be open for such a feature? 😋
i can open an issue and even try to dig down the source base to see if i can help 😌

[the-mikedavis]

I don't think it's necessary, hx --health shows the runtime directory

[amtoine]

I don't think it's necessary, hx --health shows the runtime directory

oooooh you are 100% right 🤩

i did not see that line 👀
then it is perfect for me 😌

thanks for the information 😉