Can we use tree-sitter as a pager?

[Freed-Wu]

Can we use tree-sitter as a pager like bat and pygmentize?

[yehorb]

Direct answer - no. As it says in the README, "Tree-sitter is a parser generator tool and an incremental parsing library." It is not possible to use the tree-sitter application to read an input and provide paged, formatted, or colored output.

If your question is more akin to "Can pager applications such as bat or less use tree-sitter to provide syntax highlighting? - yes, they can, and it is up to the maintainer (or up to you) to add such support.

A quick search for currently available solutions revealed syncat.

You can also use nvim to open files in read-only mode and use it as an ad-hoc pager, but you will not get colored output into a terminal this way.

[ahlinc]

Actually it's possible to use it in a pipe with the less util like: tree-sitter parse ... | less -r if to write an own wrapper on top of it.

I permanently use it as the next:

[Freed-Wu]

@ahlinc , so is it a wrapper or a new program we don't know? What is it?

[amaanq]

it's an alias

[yehorb]

If I assume that ts means tree-sitter and p means parse subcommand, what do -oc flags mean? These are not valid flags for tree-sitter parse, at least not for the current version...

[ahlinc]

It's a custom CLI that isn't upstreamed yet and can be built and installed by cargo install --git https://github.com/ahlinc/tree-sitter --branch alpha, after that you may do a copy of that binary somewhere if you need to use original tree-sitter CLI too. Be aware that it may contain bugs that aren't exist in the original CLI.

[Freed-Wu]

Good, wait it be upstreamed. 👍