Comment by b0a04gl

fair, recursive groups exist, and yeah stage 2’s structure is solid. but the point was less about recursion as a feature and more about context awareness. vim’s engine lets you nest, sure, but it doesnt preserve intent across transitions. you can recurse into quoted strings, command subs, etc, but you can’t reflect on why you entered a state. there's no semantic trace. take ysh: command vs expression isn’t just syntactic, it shifts meaning of the same tokens. `[` in one context is an index, in another it’s test. vim can match both, but it can’t decide which meaning is active unless the outer mode is remembered. and that’s the gap

tbh the plugin is impressive, no question. but that memoryless model will always need compromises, rule layering, and finetuned sync tricks. treesitter has its issues too, agreed. but having typed nodes and scope trees gives a baseline advantage when meaning depends on ancestry.