Re: Is it better to add treesitter modes to core?

[Stefan Kangas]

Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev> writes:

>> Yes, but VSCode has some niceties that we don't.  When Emacs displays an
>> unobtrusive little popup in the right corner saying
>>
>>      "Hello, this looks like $LANGUAGE, do you want to install support
>>      for that?  [YES/NO]"
>>
>> then I will agree with you that it's less important to keep stuff in
>> core.
>
> That seems like the wrong positioning of the cart and the horse, IMHO.

I suggest that, at least the way things stand, it would be desirable to
have the basic programming modes available in core, for the top N
languages.  There's also no significant drawback to doing so.

If we make it substantially easier to install extensions and customize
Emacs in the future, then this might turn out to be less important.  We
will then adapt our way of working to that reality.

This seems to me like exactly the right way to position our horse and
cart.

> As we've observed, moving things out of the core is *hard*.

I propose that this consideration should not be decisive for how we
proceed.  If the current situation is not ideal, it's not horrible
either.

We can find better ways of doing things (e.g. distributing GNU ELPA
packages with Emacs), but whatever we do later, it doesn't seem urgent
to avoid adding things to core right now.

>> For some of the things listed there, we don't even have a mode.
>
> I'm pretty sure we would have one somewhere, if not in-tree, for the
> vast majority of cases.

(I couldn't find one for /etc/fstab, FWIW.  That may or may not be a
silly example, but OTOH what's not to like about syntax highlighting.
Maybe there were better examples too, I can't remember.)

> I think it will be a good idea to have someone check out the ada-ts-mode
> I linked to previously in this thread, and maybe talk to the author
> about adding it to ELPA (GNU or NonGNU), if no major problems come up.
>
> So far it looks like it has very little users (judging by the numbers of
> stars and open/closed issues - which is zero), that's kind of sad.

Philip, what do you think about this?