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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

The query language and CLI tools are absolutely user-facing features on their own. But even if they aren't, developers still need to be able to learn from the docs. Currently that's very difficult to do. My experience is that you have to rely heavily on copying other people's examples in order to make progress.

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Point taken about the developer documentation. But the query language is only user-facing if the tool you're using exposes it. And the CLI only if you need to build your own grammars; I expect that to be less and less common as time goes on.

Maybe this is a "blind spot" of sorts to the developers of Tree Sitter, but I find that the CLI is directly useful for end users to perform queries on their code. Maybe it would be better if we had dedicated tools that were more oriented at end users rather than developers of TS grammars, but it seems silly not to use a perfectly good tool that already exists.

Somewhat of an aside about building grammars, I have found that the grammars are relatively hard to make small modifications or extensions to. Whereas it's relatively easy with e.g. traditional Vim syntax highlighting. Making grammars easier to extend would be valuable for users of languages like SQL that have a zillion custom dialects.

> I find that the CLI is directly useful for end users to perform queries on their code

That's interesting; what do they use the results for?

> I have found that the grammars are relatively hard to make small modifications or extensions to

Definitely true. I think this may be an inherent problem of the system and the parser generation, though. I am not sure it's solvable by the grammar authors.

I use it for code search. I can search for the definition of a given function, or all places that a particular function is called by name.

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