Product Launch
anonymous
87 points
15 comments
Posted24 days agoActive23 days ago
Arborium
arborium.bearcove.eulaunchedlibrarydevelopers
Key Features
Tree-sitter code highlightingNative target supportWASM target support
Tech Stack
Tree-sitter
Key Features
Tech Stack
Or... website text editors which historically have had imperfect syntax highlighting.
Notice the Zed sponsorship.
That's the best one sentence description there is and it's at the top of the Github README. I think that would fit nice at the top of https://arborium.bearcove.eu too
You can use it as a normal Rust library, or you can use a JavaScript/WASM wrapper to highlight source code on a web page.
Just wanted to note that tree-sitter is also more than that: it's a general incremental parser that is specialised for gracefully and efficiently parsing partially-correct code snippets or code being edited live. It's used for highlighting here, but it can be used for anything that requires awareness of the code structure.
I also had a hard time understanding the context given just the link.
The ease of use to highlight static text via Arborium seems nice:
<script src="arborium.iife.js"></script>
<pre><code class="language-python">
def hello(name):
print("Hello " + name);
</code></pre>
And how would one add SCAD support?
The code isn't minified so you can see how they do it by looking at the `doHighlight()` function here https://arborium.bearcove.eu/pkg/app.generated.js
Hmm .. and the approach already shows its weaknesses when I play with it: When I search for something on the page, it gives me twice as many hits as there are. And jumps around two times to each hit when I use the "next" button.
I wonder if that is fixable.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Highlight
All the trickery vanishes and you get first-class CSS support.
https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/cr...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
On this side, I'm not a bot, and fortunately even in 2025 nobody on the internet knows that you are a dog.
My favorite is nvim-treesitter-textobjects which gives you dozens of new targets for vim motions, such as a function call or the condition of a loop.
But then, on the other hand, I had given up on a scratch code editor for a game development project I'm working on, and just loosely wrapped up the monaco editor which I'm guessing is going to be pretty bare when I actually get around to trying to code with it, in browser (I'm aware that it is robust, but from what I gather, a lot of its features come from third-party dev as a way to keep the core functionality pure). Given that I want to be able to script in C# (aside from just js/ts), I was sure I was going to have to figure something complicated out.
But, honestly, I think this solves all of my most concerning issues! What a sweet little library!
[0] https://magnitce-code-example-e81613.gitlab.io/ (please excuse the unfinished-ness; I'm working on a JSDoc-to-documentation library that automates the documentation for me so there are minor issues, like the install text not changing on selection)
I'm happy to see that tree sitter highlighting on the web is finally a thing. This seems really solid although the bundle size is a lot.
They also load 1 mb of fonts. In total, this page is close to 3 mb.
Tree-sitter is a parser generator tool and an incremental parsing library. It can build a concrete syntax tree for a source file and efficiently update the syntax tree as the source file is edited.
It’s not a new discovery, I just didn’t know docs.rs (intentionally) wasn’t blocking this. Cf https://docs.rs/pwnies/0.0.13/pwnies/
(This all makes more sense if you read the blog post instead of the direct arborium link: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/my-gift-to-the-rust-docs-te...)
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