jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 17:26): jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 17:26):Here's a topic for me to spam @Eli Dowling with questions and suggestions!
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 17:27):(and anyone else who's invested in syntax highlighting or semantic editing)
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 17:30):It looks like plain defs are mis-categorized as parameters:
inherits = "dracula"
"parameter" = "red"
"ui.text" = "grey"
"variable" = "black"
Screenshot_20250310_112103.png
(dracula colors variable.parameter orange+italics)
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 17:31):What should the distinctions be between
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 17:33):Also, if you'd prefer I take a more "try to fix it myself" approach, I can learn the query syntax and shift to PRs.
Eli Dowling (Mar 10 2025 at 17:36):Not a clue tbh. Early a fellow came in and made a pr making the queries more specific... and it didn't break my highlighting so I just shrugged and merged it :sweat_smile:
Eli Dowling (Mar 10 2025 at 17:36):if you want to know the correct ones:
https://docs.helix-editor.com/themes.html#scopes
Eli Dowling (Mar 10 2025 at 17:37):and these:
https://docs.helix-editor.com/guides/textobject.html
Eli Dowling (Mar 10 2025 at 17:38):I think part of the problem is that neovim uses different names. So he may have just been working of that list
Eli Dowling (Mar 10 2025 at 17:39):Totally feel free to go through and fix any that improve things on the helix side and then PR it in.
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 19:13):Interesting, module doesn't appear in Helix's docs - did you get it from a different list?
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 19:31):I guess a bigger question is - what's the intended relationship between
because it all seems arbitrary to me.
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 20:26):JanCVanB said:
Interesting,
moduledoesn't appear in Helix's docs - did you get it from a different list?
Same for these:
Anthony Bullard (Mar 10 2025 at 21:15):It’s hard for me to judge these until the examples have brace delimited blocks
Anthony Bullard (Mar 10 2025 at 21:16):Then I can tell how much I like a certain highlighting scheme
Anthony Bullard (Mar 10 2025 at 21:16):Oh, and of course, see it in Catppuccin Mocha
Eli Dowling (Mar 10 2025 at 21:17):All that actually matters is what's defined in the theme within helix. Everything else is just a suggestion.
Anthony Bullard (Mar 10 2025 at 21:18):ahemNeovim
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 21:22):Eli Dowling said:
All that actually matters is what's defined in the theme within helix. Everything else is just a suggestion.
Sure, but I'm wondering what is this sitter's source of truth for what to name the exported keys - do you want to export a superset of anything that downstream themes want to consume, including some redundant names for the same things? Are Helix's conventions given any higher priority than Neovim's?
Eli Dowling (Mar 10 2025 at 21:27):Anthony Bullard said:
ahemNeovim
Well Jan is editing the helix highlights.
The neovim has its own highlights file and the same rule applies there too.
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 21:28):Anthony Bullard said:
ahemNeovim
I'm trying to make a set of editor-agnostic themes that color .roc files in a way that matches our mental model of the syntax :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:
Eli Dowling (Mar 10 2025 at 21:30):Oh, you basically just can't do that. The helix and neovim queries work different
They are interpreted in reverse order for example.
The conventions for names of things are different. It's all a total mess tbh.
That's why we maintain two sets of query files.
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 21:32):Yes, and I plan to generate & maintain a separate file for each editor x theme.
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 21:34):Now I see your neovim dir - so queries/highlights.scm should use Helix's highlighting scopes as the source of truth?
Eli Dowling (Mar 10 2025 at 21:35):Ahhh I think I understand now.
Well I would follow the conventions of each platform and then just add any extensions you need.
Eli Dowling (Mar 10 2025 at 21:36):From memory the highlights have precedence so you can do type.this.that and as long as a theme has type it'll highlight it even if it doesn't have the more specific versions.
Double check that though
Eli Dowling (Mar 10 2025 at 21:37):Yes, the default queries are for helix. Because it closely follows the tree sitter spec... Neovim just kinda does whatever
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 21:37):Do you know where those 13 non-Helix-sourced scopes above came from?
Eli Dowling (Mar 10 2025 at 21:39):If you look at the repo the very first full request is from the guy adding extra highlighting, I'd guess it's from that.
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 21:39):Gotttcha. Thanks!
Eli Dowling (Mar 10 2025 at 21:39):I know he wanted to build a more precise theme that added more information. But I think he might have been working in neovim
Eli Dowling (Mar 10 2025 at 21:40):He is probably in Zulip I'd imagine
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 21:40):I can start working to align that file 100% with Helix conventions.
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 21:43):Karl said:
I started messing with the tree-sitter grammar because I was trying to figure out why thing weren't highlighting. One thing led to another and I spent a good chunk of yesterday changing things and I now have seven reasonably sized commits. I'd like to know if you'd like them in one large PR or a set of smaller ones.
A lot of things are uncontroversial (e.g. tagging doc comments, tagging builtins) but some are more questionable like tagging match captures as parameters so that tree-sitters local analysis highlights typos.
Here's a before and after using my theme:
Screenshot-2024-04-01-at-5.06.49-PM.png
Screenshot-2024-04-01-at-5.08.03-PM.pngSome things come from extending the highlight match tags (e.g. separate colorspace for typedefs, highlighting fn defs) so other themes would need to be tweaked for full support.
Aha!
Eli Dowling (Mar 10 2025 at 21:45):Hey nicely done
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 22:12):JanCVanB said:
I can start working to align that file 100% with Helix conventions.
If @Karl doesn't voice any concerns, @Eli Dowling does this sound right to you?
Karl (Mar 10 2025 at 22:15):I think it makes more sense to fit in with someone's standards. I like that the extra fields allow for additional highlighting but I expect I'm the only one taking advantage of it.
Eli Dowling (Mar 10 2025 at 22:19):Yeah align then as much as possible. But also feel free to keep or adapt any existing extensions to the spec for roc specific stuff
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 22:43):Sweet, I'll try!
jan kili (Mar 10 2025 at 22:44):This is my work-in-progress refactor of Helix Dracula, with some three-way analysis of discrepancies: https://gitlab.com/JanCVanB/rocwise-editor-themes/-/blob/main/helix/dracula.toml?ref_type=heads
jan kili (Mar 11 2025 at 01:40):@Eli Dowling What does "keep most generic types at the bottom for helix" mean? https://github.com/faldor20/tree-sitter-roc/blob/master/queries/highlights.scm#L205
jan kili (Mar 11 2025 at 02:02):I infer that higher in the file is higher priority?
Eli Dowling (Mar 11 2025 at 04:15):Correct!
jan kili (Mar 11 2025 at 04:57):Is that just a Helix thing, hence the comment?
Eli Dowling (Mar 11 2025 at 07:06):Yeah, neovim evaluates it the other way around. Which is why you may notice the order is kind of inverted
Jasper Woudenberg (Mar 11 2025 at 07:34):With regards to the evaluation order: I ran into this as well working to pull in tree-sitter for syntax-highlighting in my static site generation platform. Sharing here in case it's useful: it looks like Helix is working on flipping the order:
https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/9436
The order Neovim/Zed use does appear to be the "correct" one according to tree-sitter. It's hard to find though, I believe I found mention in the code for highlighting project included in tree-sitter, also these release notes:
https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/releases/tag/v0.21.0
jan kili (Mar 11 2025 at 08:43):So far I've refactored the highlights to make it easier to see the discrepancies: https://github.com/JanCVanB/tree-sitter-roc/blob/helixify_highlight_names/queries/highlights.scm
I'll continue by resolving them!
jan kili (Mar 11 2025 at 19:47):@Eli Dowling I see you chose to highlight tags with @constructor and @type.enum.variant - those make sense and seem to be colored by Helix themes. There is a @tag name that we could use instead of @constructor with similar coloring support in themes, but it's not clearly superior.
Eli Dowling (Mar 11 2025 at 20:25):I am happy to leave it up to you to make the call on whether you think it looks better as a tag or a constructor. when I did it I don't believe my theme had any support for tag so I made it a constructor as that was what other languages used for unions.
Mostly I would also try and follow the conventions of other functional programming languages.
Eli Dowling (Mar 11 2025 at 20:26):It's nice if a user coming to roc from Haskell can look at roc code and immediately see familiar colours for familiar constructs
jan kili (Mar 11 2025 at 20:30):Good call! I'll look into how Haskell's tree-sitter implementation(s?) categorize things. Any other comparables you want, in addition to Elm?
Eli Dowling (Mar 11 2025 at 20:31):Elm, Haskell, Ocaml, Scala, elixir would probably cover like 95% of all production FP code right?
Eli Dowling (Mar 11 2025 at 20:31):Can't forget my beloved Ocaml :stuck_out_tongue_wink:.
jan kili (Mar 11 2025 at 20:33):Unrelated, I see that almost half of the custom highlight names I listed above seem to be to facilitate coloring the same symbols/things differently if they're in typedefs - is that something you want to maintain?
Eli Dowling (Mar 11 2025 at 20:34):All are probably worth a glance. I'd be inclined to weight the ones that are most recently created/updated with a lot more precidence.
TS norms and names have changed a fair bit over time, so it's worth taking recency into account
Eli Dowling (Mar 11 2025 at 20:35):Also for the queries you should be looking at the queries in the helix repo rather than any queries inside the actual tree sitter grammars. Sometimes they are quite different
Eli Dowling (Mar 11 2025 at 20:35):But helix ones are more likely to be more up to date with helix conventions/actually tested
jan kili (Mar 11 2025 at 20:37):Cool, I'll default to injecting an indication they're original, like
@punctuation.delimiter.typedef
to
@punctuation.delimiter.roc.typedef
Eli Dowling (Mar 11 2025 at 20:38):JanCVanB said:
Unrelated, I see that almost half of the custom highlight names I listed above seem to be to facilitate coloring the same symbols/things differently if they're in typedefs - is that something you want to maintain?
I really don't care about that at all.
I think it'd be good to have a distinction between tag types and other types.
But also there isn't any harm in being more specific if people want to use them.
But yes I think prefixing them helps a lot
Eli Dowling (Mar 11 2025 at 20:38):I really wouldn't stress about it though. Other than annoying @Karl :sweat_smile:
jan kili (Mar 11 2025 at 20:38):Oops misread your previous - understood
jan kili (Mar 11 2025 at 20:40):Yeah the only ones I'm eager to fully delete are those used instead of a standard one.
Eli Dowling (Mar 11 2025 at 20:40):Oh sorry, yeah that was confusing. For total clarity, I did mean all the different languages highlight queries.
Eli Dowling (Mar 11 2025 at 20:42):I trust you to make the right choice as far as weighing between being specific and just providing options that nobody will ever actually use.
I'd only suggest leaning towards simple and standard for the sake of future maintenance. Remember people can override this if they really want crazy over the top everything in rainbow.
jan kili (Mar 13 2025 at 01:29):I have more ideas, but I'll pause here! https://github.com/faldor20/tree-sitter-roc/pull/33 Feedback very welcome :smile:
jan kili (Mar 13 2025 at 01:29):Heads up, it's a nearly-total refactor. I rebased a bunch, to keep the incremental commit chain fairly readable.
jan kili (Mar 13 2025 at 05:06):Here's a preview of the nearly-ready Helix Dracula theme that plays nicely with the PR above :heart_eyes:
https://gitlab.com/JanCVanB/rocwise-editor-themes/-/blob/improve_helix_dracula/helix/dracula.toml?ref_type=heads
Screenshot_20250312_230533.png
jan kili (Mar 13 2025 at 05:08):... and that's with ui.text still set to a super faded grey - we now have seemingly-complete coverage, because the only times I see it in code files now is with tree sitter errors
Eli Dowling (Mar 13 2025 at 05:55):Cool! I'll take a look in the next couple of days. Mostly, so long as it still looks good with vanilla themes I'm happy :)
jan kili (Mar 13 2025 at 12:35):Sweet! No urgency, as this isn't blocking me.
Good call - I'll test it with the most popular builtins and post screenshots in the PR.
jan kili (Mar 13 2025 at 23:36)::check: Posted.
Eli Dowling (Mar 14 2025 at 22:37):@JanCVanB Just added a comment.
Eli Dowling (Mar 19 2025 at 20:17):@JanCVanB Sorry this took so long. I made some alterations.
very happy with it overall, there were just a few places where I wanted to align better to other langauages/helix recommendations
I made a pr to your branch:
https://github.com/JanCVanB/tree-sitter-roc/pull/1
jan kili (Mar 19 2025 at 20:33):Woohoo! Thanks, I'll review that today.
jan kili (Mar 20 2025 at 18:25):@Eli Dowling Merged! Ready for re-review on 33 :smile:
Eli Dowling (Mar 20 2025 at 19:17):@JanCVanB you were happy with all those changes? Just letting you know I'm totally open to feedback or disagreement.
Eli Dowling (Mar 20 2025 at 19:20):If you're happy at this point, I'm happy to and I'll merge :)
jan kili (Mar 20 2025 at 20:09):I was indeed happy with all :)
jan kili (Mar 20 2025 at 20:11):I'm confident that any room for improvement will be found by incoming PRs for the remaining TODOs
jan kili (Mar 20 2025 at 20:12):After this refactor merges, other PRs can be much more parallel
jan kili (Mar 20 2025 at 20:30):For example, you removing these is consistent with your choice to recategorize : as punctuation. There are multiple different answers to "so now how can I color : the same as the key before it in records", but we should leave that to follow-up discussions and not hold up this refactor.
Richard Feldman (Mar 20 2025 at 21:01):Eli Dowling said:
Elm, Haskell, Ocaml, Scala, elixir would probably cover like 95% of all production FP code right?
if Clojure is in there then yes, but I suspect Clojure is over 5% of that by itself
Eli Dowling (Mar 20 2025 at 21:50):See I'm always just a little leery of calling clojure FP... It's just, it feels distinct from those other languages in some ways. I recently saw an article in lobsters comparing an Ocaml and clojure implementation of the same thing and I feel like Ocaml one would be immediately understandable/ seem normal to any user of the other languages I listed. The clojure one... Not so much
Also comparing the token assignment of clojure to us probably doesn't reveal much given it's a lisp :sweat_smile:
Richard Feldman (Mar 20 2025 at 22:09):big can of worms there haha
Richard Feldman (Mar 20 2025 at 22:11):but yes, agreed that Clojure syntax highlighting won't have much to do with ours :big_smile:
Eli Dowling (Mar 20 2025 at 22:11):That can of worms is why I want to learn clojure sometime... If other people are chowing down on the worms and just absolutely loving it, at some point you've gotta wonder.. maybe worms are worth trying.
Brendan Hansknecht (Mar 20 2025 at 22:46):I would have guessed that clojure is more fp than scala
Brendan Hansknecht (Mar 20 2025 at 22:47):Also, I wonder how much production code is in erlang. Just silently running the world.
Eli Dowling (Mar 21 2025 at 00:33):Hahah mee too Brendan, me too...
It comes up anytime I feel I've been using something for a long time and I have the realisation that nothing has ever had a single failure.
I have the little, sniff sniff smells like bean... Wait, no it's BEAM
Undefined Behavior (Mar 21 2025 at 05:08):Brendan Hansknecht said:
Also, I wonder how much production code is in erlang. Just silently running the world.
90% of internet traffic runs through Erlang. See: https://x.com/guieevc/status/1002494428748140544
cc @Brendan Hansknecht
Undefined Behavior (Mar 21 2025 at 05:15):This is getting off-topic, but I'd asked this question because I was curious if, theoretically, a Roc Platform could exist that copied the behavior of the Erlang Runtime System and BEAM VM. Obviously, it's no joke to re-implement OTP/BEAM, but would a Roc Platform make it possible? (I'm new to Roc, pardon my ignorance)
Brendan Hansknecht (Mar 21 2025 at 06:21):Theoretically you could use a roc platform to run roc directly on the BEAM VM. Roc would be a native library and the platform would be written in erlang or elixir
Brendan Hansknecht (Mar 21 2025 at 06:21):Though you could also fully reimplement the BEAM VM in a roc platform instead
Last updated: Jul 26 2025 at 12:14 UTC
