Comment by dleslie
14 hours ago
Tree sitter support is half baked in the same way official LSP support is, only kind of worse.
Eglot won't help you get your system ready for LSP work, it will only avail itself if what's there. It doesn't even auto detect and configure that, either. There's no user prompting, so you'll have to read the docs to know that this even needs to be done.
Similarly, tree sitter support doesn't include the grammars! And those aren't typically sitting in your package repository, so users have to find a grammar and compile it themselves. There's not even a good recommendation given by Emacs on where to get them, leaving users to hope that whatever repository showed up on a Google search is both in good working order and safe to use.
It's really quite a failure on Emacs.
In Emacs 31 none of what you’re saying is true. Grammars auto install and setting them up is easy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1utghab/treesitter_s...
Well that's a nice change; I'm still on Emacs 30.
But note that this is not the default. Users have to enable that behaviour, and know to enable it. That's a bad default.
I speak only for myself and not the Emacs team, but ... IMO it shouldn't do this by default - unless there is a clear "winner" among all the choices.
IIRC, for eglot I had to install a Python language server. There are a bunch of them. Why would I want it to pick one by default?
I don't know if Emacs will ever have an IDE with TS and LSP working "out of the box" without some configuration. From my experience with Eglot, if it were enabled by default, it would confuse the heck out of some users who just want to, say, edit a Python script.
There are always opinionated releases like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs that can set whatever nice defaults you think should be there. Leave vanilla Emacs to be, well, vanilla. Emacs, while it can be a decent IDE, is not an IDE and shouldn't default to being one.
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“ask” mode for installing tree-sitter grammars is the default setting. Tree-sitter modes broadly aren’t enabled by default, but that seems at least consistent with eMacs defaulting to very few modes enabled by default.
The critique converning lsp and eglot support is nonetheless true.
If it can't find an LSP binary, Eglot will prompt you to pick one, and tell you which one it was looking for. That seems reasonable to me. I wouldn't want Emacs to download and install random binaries on my system automatically.
My experience with Emacs 30 is that Eglot will prompt and show nothing of meaningful assistance beyond a name. That leaves me to run a google search to find whatever binaries fit the description.
They host binaries already; why not host all of the binaries necessary for the supported features to function?