Things that worked for me in the past.

First. See the path of the config file with tree-sitter init-config

$ tree-sitter init-config
Remove your existing config file first: /home/muller/.tree-sitter/config.json

Now, see if the "parser-directories" in the config.json`` is set correctly:

If your grammar is at /home/foo/git/tree-sitter-go/src/parser.c the parser-directories should include /home/foo/git.

Does it show when you run tree-sitter dump-languages?

See if there is any file path on tree-sitter-go/package.json and check if they are correctly set (might try to include some file that doesn’t exist).

Lastly, you can try running tree-sitter generate at tree-sitter-go. I had issues fix themselves after running this (might have been a coincidence).

After adding the correct path (for future readers - in my case, because the directory I was working in was ~/tree-sitter-javascript, I had to add ~ to the parser-directories subsection, with the config file located at ~/.tree-sitter/config.json after running ./tree-sitter init-config), it does!

It seems odd that tree-sitter doesn’t use the same behavior it does for tree-sitter test when looking for a highlighter to use. Perhaps it should? (I’d be glad to take up a PR to do so)

I’m seeing the module I’m trying to author, but it’s output in dump-languages looks wrong. Ringing my head after following the docs and suggestions here. I’ve tried both the local and globally installed tree-sitter, both giving the same results.

$ tree-sitter dump-languages
scope: 
parser: "/home/tony/nvim/tree-sitter-cue"
highlights: None
file_types: []
content_regex: None
injection_regex: None

$ tree-sitter highlight test/cue/first.cue
No language found for path "test/cue/first.cue"

  // from package.json
  "tree-sitter": {
    "scope": "source.cue",
    "file-types": ["cue"]
  }

  // from ~/.config/tree-sitter/config.json
  "parser-directories": [
    "/home/tony/nvim"
  ],

~Any thoughts or suggestions that could help here?~

The issue was that I did not make the entry in package.json a list…

@ahlinc Nope, it works fine on the upstream CLI. Now I’m just getting ERROR AST nodes without any explanation or what was expected.

@ahlinc I fixed it, my JSON file had a syntax error. (Oops?)

Issue summary

tree-sitter highlight and tree-sitter test don’t behave in the same way.

• Test command works with the language defined in the current folder.
• Highlight requires adding the parent-folder path to "parser-directories" in the config file (that’s the solution)

Preferred solution

• Make Highlight behave just like test.

I hope this helps

TODO:

• Add a tips flag to tree-sitter generator that would show suggestions and in this case it will suggest to set the scope field as source.LANG_NAME by meaning that it’s best practice to to name languages with the source. prefix.
• In case of missing language add to tree-sitter parser error output suggestions what to check to resolve the issue.
• Improve tree-sitter-loader select_language(...) behaviour. Actually done, but needs public PR.

Thanks @alemuller I didn’t think to try tree-sitter dump-languages. It does find the language but I noticed all languages have highlights: None, per following terminal dump:

(base) [gordon@hypersonic tree-sitter-go]$ tree-sitter dump-languages
scope: input.turbowave
parser: "/home/gordon/codes/tree-sitter-turbowave/"
highlights: None
file_types: ["tw"]
content_regex: None
injection_regex: None

scope: source.bas
parser: "/home/gordon/codes/tree-sitter-applesoft/"
highlights: None
file_types: ["bas"]
content_regex: None
injection_regex: None

scope: source.go
parser: "/home/gordon/codes/tree-sitter-go/"
highlights: None
file_types: ["go"]
content_regex: None
injection_regex: None

Is that a clue? The rest seems to check out. I did try tree-sitter generate as well (again) but still the same thread panic.