inkjet 0.9.1

Features

• Language grammars are linked into the executable as C functions - no need to load anything at runtime!
• Pluggable formatters. Inkjet includes a formatter for HTML, and you can write your own if needed.
• Highlight into a new String or a std::io::Writer, depending on your use case.
• Specify languages explicitly (from an enum) or look them up using a token like "rs" or "rust".
• Extremely cursed build.rs

Included Languages

Inkjet comes bundled with support for over seventy languages, and it's easy to add more - see the FAQ section.

Cargo Features

• (Default) html - enables the bundled HTML formatter, which depends on v_htmlescape and the theme feature.
• (Default) theme - enables the theme API, which depends on ahash, toml and serde.
• (Default) all-languages - enables all languages.
• language-{name} - enables the specified language.
  • If you want to only enable a subset of the included languages, you'll have to set default-features=false and manually re-add each language you want to use.

FAQ

"Why is Inkjet so large?"

Parser sources generated by tree-sitter can grow quite big, with some being dozens of megabytes in size. Inkjet has to bundle these sources for all the languages it supports, so it adds up. (According to loc, there are over 16 million lines of C code!)

"Why is Inkjet taking so long to build?"

Because it has to compile and link in dozens of C/C++ programs (the parsers and scanners for every language Inkjet bundles.)

However, after the first build, these artifacts will be cached and subsequent builds should be much faster.

"Why does highlighting require a mutable reference to the highlighter?

Under the hood, Inkjet creates a tree-sitter highlighter/parser object, which in turn dynamically allocates a chunk of working memory. Using the same highlighter for multiple simultaneous jobs would therefore cause all sorts of nasty UB.

If you want to highlight in parallel, you'll have to create a clone of the highlighter for each thread.

"A language I want to highlight isn't bundled with Inkjet!"

Assuming that you or someone else has implemented a highlighting-ready tree-sitter grammar for the language you want, adding it to Inkjet is easy! Just open an issue asking for it to be added, linking to the grammar repository for the language.

However, please note that:

• Inkjet currently only supports grammar repositories that check in the parser generated by tree-sitter (in order to avoid a build-time dependency on node/npm.)
• Inkjet requires that the grammar include (at minimum) a highlights.scm query targeted at the base tree-sitter library. Extended queries (such as those from nvim-treesitter) will not work.
• I will not support blockchain/smart contract languages like Solidity. Please take your scam enablers to a fork.

Building

For normal use, Inkjet will compile automatically just like any other crate.

However, if you have forked the repository and want to update the bundled languages, you'll need to set some environment variables:

• INKJET_REDOWNLOAD_LANGS will wipe the languages/ directory and redownload everything from scratch.
• INKJET_REBUILD_LANGS_MODULE will wipe src/languages.rs and regenerate it from scratch.

The value of these variables doesn't matter - they just have to be set.

Acknowledgements

• Inkjet would not be possible without tree-sitter and the ecosystem of grammars surrounding it.
• Many languages are only supported thanks to the highlighting queries created by the Helix project.