trishume

syntect

Rust2017–2021

trishume / syntect

syntect

Rust library for syntax highlighting using Sublime Text syntax definitions.

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7Distinct people

11Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

2.5KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Rust library for syntax highlighting using Sublime Text syntax definitions.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

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Also in these discussions

sourcegraph/syntect_server · linked in 3 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 11:34:28 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year11 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-02-08 16:57:32 UTC to 2021-05-21 09:00:26 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	4	4
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	3
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

4 sources

trishume·Sep 24, 2017

Syntect's grammars are regex based, they're based on ST3's grammars which are an extension of the fundamental model used by Textmate/Atom/VSCode. They're stronger than just regexes though, there's a fancy stack machine with all sorts of features laid on top that allows it to do full parsing of a lot of languages. The more modern grammars are written with a regex style that makes heavier use of the stack machine and so only uses regexes that can be turned into a DFA. There's ongoing work to use a layer on top of Rust's super-fast DFA-based regex engine to accelerate these grammars https://github.com/trishume/syntect/pull/34. The problem with using non-regex based grammars is that you have to write them yourself. Syntect is something like 4000 lines of code but the grammars it uses total around 35k lines, and that's just the included ones,

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not the full ecosystem of online grammars. Basically unless you only want to support a small set of languages, a non-regex-based highlighting library is fairly infeasibly for a single hobbyist.

In Chroma – A General purpose syntax highlighter in Go

trishume·Sep 24, 2017

Shameless plug for my syntax highlighting library in Rust which uses Sublime Text 3 grammars, which give much richer highlighting and semantic information than Pygments: https://github.com/trishume/syntect Sourcegraph also wrote a server using syntect which provides an API for highlighting, which they use to power their new server, so you can use it from any language (at a cost): https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/announcing-sourcegraph-2 https://github.com/sourcegraph/syntect_server

In Chroma – A General purpose syntax highlighter in Go

trishume·Mar 23, 2017

As the author, this is the kind of condescension of Sublime users that annoys me. I think I know vim quite well, I've been using vim bindings for 5 years now across varying editors. I know almost all Vim bindings. How about a test? Suppose my cursor is on line 198 of https://github.com/trishume/syntect/blob/ef3b99b06b72e89b7a0.... I want to copy "match_pat.has_captures && cur_level.captures.is_some()" on line 172. If you give me an efficient sequence of vim bindings for that movement I can tell you if I know what everything does without looking it up. I think a more apt criticism would be that I think too slowly to use Vim. I can figure out that "26j4wy10e" does what I want, and at my normal english characters/second typing speed that is faster than doing the selection with my mouse. However, when I actually try and do that without figuri

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ng it out ahead of time I take longer to read, count and figure out the right numbers and actions, then type the individual characters (which due to muscle memory for english I'm slower at than typing english). I end up being slower than the mouse, and with a higher mental load. You could say I just need to "git gud" and practice, but if practicing for hours a day for 5 years doesn't get me to the point that I'm better than the mouse, I think it's time to say that maybe it isn't a lack of practice, but perhaps an innate skill difference. That all presumes that there exists a substantial number of people who are faster in practice at long distance text selection with vim shortcuts than I am with the mouse. I have yet to see someone where I can confidently say that is the case, and I've watched a reasonable number of vim users. I guess everyone I've seen using vim (including many 5+ year users) is a "vim n00b" in your model, that sounds a bit "no true scotsman"-like.

In My Text Editor Journey: Vim, Spacemacs, Atom and Sublime Text

trishume·Feb 8, 2017

Shameless plug: my implementation of Sublime's syntax highlighting engine in Rust has similar optimizations and more. I'm not at my computer to benchmark on the same files but it should be >2x as fast as their "after" numbers just based on lines/second for JS-like files. This evening I'm even trying to port it to a pure Rust regex engine that should eliminate non-Rust code and make it substantially faster. It also implements the sublime-syntax format which is a superset of tmlanguage that allows even nicer highlighting. https://github.com/trishume/syntect

In Optimizations in Syntax Highlighting