Elixir package for Sublime Text 4

You’re welcome, @distefam!

It’s a shame that Zed has this text rendering issue on LoDPI screens. It doesn’t really seem that bad on my external monitor. The text could certainly be sharper, but it’s almost unnoticeable.

I’ve successfully avoided VSCode the whole time, so I hope Zed will not go down a similar road. I think they do place importance on keeping things lean, tidy and fast. There are already some complex features like the AI assistant or Collaboration, but I think they don’t get in your way at all.

I didn’t think it possible so soon but I’m already using Zed daily for work. Of course, it’s not as polished as ST but the ability to properly select syntax nodes alone along with other nice things is enough to make me happy and tolerate minor annoyances.

Thanks for the update, @aziz. I’m still sticking with SublimeText for now and this is much appreciated. I, too, have been eyeing Zed. Unfortunately, Zed has an issue that makes it completely unusable for me. And, my concern about Zed is that it might become the next VS Code in terms of clutter and lack of focus. I still prefer SublimeText for this reason, but I do agree that the community surrounding it, including package development, seems to have waned. I’ve still yet to find an editor that gets out of my way as much as possible as Sublime, but hoping that Zed can resist the siren call of becoming too complex.

Hey, everyone! I can finally announce version 4 of this plugin:

However, I’d also like to inform you that this will be the last version I’m going to release, except perhaps for minor bug-fix releases.

ST has served me well over the years, but I’m excited about Zed and plan on switching to it completely eventually. Zed isn’t quite there yet, but it’s in active development and becoming more and more usable with each release. Some of the reasons I wish to switch to Zed are:

• ST’s syntax highlighting “technology” is a dead-end and absolutely no fun to work with (I actually feel burnt out now when I look at it).
• Zed is pretty much on par with ST when it comes to speed and memory consumption.
• Updates for ST are too infrequent and don’t bring any cool noticeable improvements like I’ve seen in Zed.
• Longstanding annoying issues aren’t fixed. They are minor but maddening when they happen, like randomly not being able to comment out code with a shortcut anymore. Or when switching from file to project search, it messes up the search text. And then the search history itself is often confusing to me. I just don’t want to report bugs anymore. I feel they will go under and not be fixed for ages to come.
• My favourite is when I format the current file with a shortcut that calls mix format, ST loves to just jump up several pages. (It seems this is affected by how many files are open.)
• The search results view sucks. In Zed the results are syntax highlighted and you can even edit the code right there!
• ST isn’t good at providing features that depend on the existence of a proper syntax tree. Like increasing the selection to a larger syntax node. While it works in simple cases, try expanding the selection to an HTML attribute value and then further to include the name…

Anyway, I hope the plugin has been useful to many developers so far and wish you continued happy and productive coding with the tool of your choice!

Hi, @distefam! That’s interesting! Thanks for pointing this out. I’ve been checking out what the plugin is capable of, but I’m not sure how it could join forces with ST. Sublime’s syntax engine isn’t really controllable through Python code. You can add individual text regions with styles on top of the already highlighted code, but it would be crazy inefficient and slow to highlight views solely with TreeSitter’s AST info and ST API calls to add_regions(). I imagine the plugin could be useful for code navigation or listing symbols, but then again LSP-elixir and ST already do that (for better or worse.)

It isn’t really meaningful to adapt ElixirSyntax because ST syntax definitions (YAML files with stacked regular expressions) and TreeSitter grammars are different technologies. The only thing I believe would make sense is if ST ditched its engine and replaced it with TreeSitter entirely. But as I mentioned in my original posting, judging from an exchange on GitHub that’s probably not gonna happen. Who knows, maybe it will happen when TreeSitter editors start leaving ST in the dust, but for me there isn’t one out there yet that does it for me.

I’ll continue looking into this. It’s new and definitely exciting.

@aziz Now that there is a TreeSitter plugin for SublimeText, would it be possible to update/simplify ElixirSyntax to work with its definitions for nodes rather than the scopes provided by SublimeText? It might be that I’m not understanding what is possible with the API provided by the TreeSitter plugin though and that it might not be possible to develop a color scheme based on it for SublimeText.

Hey, no worries. Enjoy developing with ElixirSyntax!

Hi aziz, sorry, my bad. In the process of recording a screencast for freezes, I have noticed that I have ElixirSublime package activated too.

Disabling it fixed the issue, now everything works as expected. My apologies for the distraction

Hi, abar!

That’s rather strange. I couldn’t reproduce the freezes using your examples. Maybe the set of plugins you have installed may cause negative interactions? Do you still have the Elixir plugin installed?

Please share your list of plugins if you don’t mind.

Also: can you make out what exactly spikes the CPU using htop?

Hi everyone, just wanted to ask, if anyone else has freezes with ElixirSyntax?

I’m using it with Sublime Text 4 to edit a phoenix project (while mix phx.server is on), but even in a simple cases I get freezes that may last up to 2 seconds.

One example: defp format(n), do: n, as I typed do: editor froze, had to wait a few seconds to see n. Another example: typing @constant [] gives a freeze.

And it’s not exclusive to typing, sometimes freezing occurs even if when I use backspace and delete whitespaces, for example.

It didn’t happen with any other plugins, and disabling ElixirSyntax seems to fix the issue. “I use arch btw” if that’s relevant.

I tried to change output_scroll_time in settings, but it changed nothing.

Apart from that it is a great plugin, and I love the .heex file support - so I would like to see if there’s a way to get it working without those disruptive interruptions.

Hey! Those snippets are coming from elixir-ls and the LSP-elixir plugin. I don’t know if they are customizable, but as a work-around you can easily create snippets yourself:

Store this XML text in Packages/User/Kernel.def.sublime-snippet:

<snippet>
  <content><![CDATA[def $1($2) do
end]]></content>
  <tabTrigger>def</tabTrigger>
  <scope>source.elixir</scope>
  <description>Kernel.def/2</description>
</snippet>