Support for Zed

[DLBPointon]

Hi all,

I've started working on a zed plugin for the LSP as part of #56 .

It's not in a great spot at the minute as it needs the language server up on npm registry and the currently tree sitter i'm using could do with some updating. Here it is if you want a look: https://github.com/DLBPointon/zed_nextflow.

[bentsherman]

We are working on an official tree-sitter grammar here: https://github.com/nextflow-io/tree-sitter-nextflow

[bentsherman]

I've been wanting to try Zed for a while but couldn't because I was on windows. Now that I'm back on Linux I'll have to check it out. I will look into the npm requirement

@ewels did we ever claim the @nextflow-io namespace on npm? I see that we have @seqera

[ewels]

Not that I'm aware of. @nextflow-io or just @nextflow?

[bentsherman]

@DLBPointon it looks like you can integrate a language server without npm: https://zed.dev/docs/extensions/languages#language-servers

I think you can just implement some interface in the Rust code. Here is a comparable example for Zig: https://github.com/zed-extensions/zig/blob/main/src/zig.rs

Let me know how it goes, and I might give it a shot myself when I have some time.

Either way, once we're ready, we can register it as an official extension: https://github.com/zed-industries/extensions

[bentsherman]

@ewels never mind, npm not urgent anymore. We have @seqera and I don't expect we'll need to publish anything nextflow-specific any time soon

[DLBPointon]

Thanks for the comments,

Good news on the tree sitter! Once it has some queries, then I can switch over to it.

I've gone through again and rewritten it based on Zig, to me it looks like it should be doing something, especially as it compiles and installs fine... no error logging at all. But it's very likely I'm not experienced enough in writing Rust this way.

It would be great to get this to the point it can be registered as an official extension.

Edit: would be helpful if i shared the branch right. https://github.com/DLBPointon/zed_nextflow/tree/original

[ctuni]

Hi all!

I also wanted to be able to use Zed with full Nextflow support, and I took inspiration from what @DLBPointon shared and tried my hand at building an extension that compiles, downloads the latest language server, loads it, and works (the "works" part was the hardest one).

But after much wrestling with Rust I've managed to do it!

Currently, the "only" thing that the extension does is to successfully load the .jar language server (I'm attaching a screenshot, where you can see the green dot for the Nextflow language server). I've added the brackets.scm and the folds.scm files, so when I write a {, Zed automatically gives me a }.

I would like to add now the highlights.scm so our nf files have their distinct highlight scheme instead of looking like plain text.

Likewise, I'm sharing the progress now because I think it's at a point where the community and those interested can contribute without having to worry about the extension compiling and the language server working: this is now done, and we can focus on extending the functionality!

Here's the link to the repo: https://github.com/ctuni/zed-nextflow

[DLBPointon]

Legend!

I'm gunna give it a go now

EDIT: I have this https://github.com/DLBPointon/zed_nextflow/blob/original/languages/nextflow/highlights.scm but this was mostly taken from the groovy plugin so can't verify 100%

Yeah that one doesn't work.

I've added

(comment) @comment
(shebang) @shebang
(include) @keyword.import
(boolean) @boolean
(number) @number
(string) @string
(closure) @closure
(workflow_definition) @type.definition
(output_declaration) @type.definition
(directive) @keyword.directive
(binary_expression) @operator
(process_invocation) @module
(parameter) @parameter
(identifier) @variable
(include) @keyword.directive
(variable_declaration) @keyword.directive

Getting some funky colours now

Something I could spend all day doing, it's genuinely pretty relaxing. But before i do, is there an official one?

[ctuni]

Legend!

I'm gunna give it a go now

EDIT: I have this https://github.com/DLBPointon/zed_nextflow/blob/original/languages/nextflow/highlights.scm but this was mostly taken from the groovy plugin so can't verify 100%

Yeah that one doesn't work.

I've added

(comment) @comment
(shebang) @shebang
(include) @keyword.import
(boolean) @boolean
(number) @number
(string) @string
(closure) @closure
(workflow_definition) @type.definition
(output_declaration) @type.definition
(directive) @keyword.directive
(binary_expression) @operator
(process_invocation) @module
(parameter) @parameter
(identifier) @variable
(include) @keyword.directive
(variable_declaration) @keyword.directive

Getting some funky colours now

Something I could spend all day doing, it's genuinely pretty relaxing. But before i do, is there an official one?

Thank you!

I think we worked in parallel 😅 because I took the highlights.scm you linked, and reduced to the minimal amount of lines to work, and I got this highlighting! I've commited it here: https://github.com/ctuni/zed-nextflow/blob/main/languages/nextflow/highlights.scm

If you don't mind, I'll add your snippet to the file, to aggregate our work

[ctuni]

@DLBPointon now the highlightings.scm contains all of our work! https://github.com/ctuni/zed-nextflow/blob/main/languages/nextflow/highlights.scm

Before continuing, I would also like to know if there's an official highlighting "guide", that way we can make sure we're doing everything by the book

[DLBPointon]

That's awesome, thanks.

I've added some more in the mean time, but I can open a branch and work from that if you'd like (actually i've just forked and opened a PR... It's a slow work day).

Annoyingly, the operators are the one thing I couldn't get working, anything more complex than (item) @item hasn't been working locally.

[bentsherman]

Thanks all for collaborating on this. @ctuni if you don't mind, let's just use your repo as the source of truth for now

When I have some time, I will try it out and figure out what else needs to be added. I know enough Rust that I can probably help with that piece if you get stuck. After that we can look into setting up an official repo under nextflow-io and getting it published as a Zed extension

One thing I'm not clear on -- how doe these scm files interact with the tree-sitter grammar? It seems like they are completely separate and have overlapping behavior. Are they supposed to work together somehow?

[DLBPointon]

They work together, effectively they map tree-sitter-grammar to IDE's theme vars.

() import the tree sitter var
@ sets which theme var that it should use.

Can find more here: https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/3-syntax-highlighting.html#highlights

Theme settings should be pretty standard, i'm using https://github.com/catppuccin/zed/blob/main/themes/catppuccin-no-italics-mauve.json you just have to find the "syntax" node to find the valid nodes that you can use.

(Import var from tree sitter) @theme-setting-to-use


(include_item) @emphasis.strong
(expression_statement) @expression_statement

Admittedly, I am only doing the bare basics with the format and seeing as Nextflow has alot going on with it, we may need to make use of the locals and injections which extend the capabilities of the above examples. I'm still reading up on it tbh but @ctuni maybe more of an expert.

[ctuni]

Thanks both, this is all coming together really nicely! 🙌

@DLBPointon the Catppuccin reference helps a lot! I’ve also been experimenting a bit with locals/injections to better capture more dynamic constructs, so I’ll try integrating those next, but have not made any progress so far.

@bentsherman totally agree, no problem in treating my repo as the working base for now. Once we’ve refined the highlights and syntax integration, we can sync it into an official Nextflow repo.

I’ll keep pushing incremental updates ASAP so we can test the full interaction between grammar + highlights in Zed, happy to continue collaborating!