Re: Creating a paradigm for leveraging Tree Sitter's power

[Theodor Thornhill]

On 24 December 2022 15:57:30 CET, Perry Smith <pedz@easesoftware.com> wrote:
>
>> On Dec 24, 2022, at 04:07, Theodor Thornhill <theo@thornhill.no> wrote:
>> 
>> Yeah. One shortcoming of tree-sitter imo is that the parser author decides 
>> what the nodes are named. So I think we need to create a framework so that 
>> every mode can map over ast-names to Emacs concepts. The goal must be for 
>> the normal Emacs things to require little to no changes, but get the 
>> benefits from treesit.
>
>To me, in my brain, Tree Sitter is far more expressive and powerful than 
>existing concepts.  “Little to no changes” to me implies fitting a much larger 
>concept into a smaller container and sacrificing the possible expressiveness 
>and power.
>

Yeah I agree, but for many things such as movement, there are some pretty 
advanced utilities already in Emacs. Would be a shame to just implement it all 
in an incompatible package just because we didn't try really hard to 
incorporate it :)

>> I think we should just start doing that immediately on the master branch and 
>> allow for "big" changes going forward. We should settle on something good 
>> for Emacs 30, hopefully.
>> 
>> I'm a little worried we feel we need "complete" proposals too soon.
>> 
>> Let's get all good ideas on the table, implemented and installed, then we 
>> can consolidate after we discover pain points etc.
>> 
>> I'm working on changing the forward/backward thing and transpose. Not only 
>> for tree-sitter, but for others as well :)
>> 
>> What do you think?
>
>Yes.  I completely agree.  I guess for others, you can take my initial post as 
>“this is the direction I’m exploring in” but it is helpful to get feedback of 
>new ideas and experiences from past mistakes.
>
>

Yeah I'm in no way objecting to anything you say. From experience (when it was 
mostly Yuan and me) these things solidify over time, and the more the merrier!

Theo