Inkjet

A batteries-included syntax highlighting library for Rust, based on tree-sitter.

Features

• Language grammars are linked into the executable as C functions - no need to load anything at runtime!
• Pluggable formatters. Inkjet includes a formatter for HTML, and writing your own is easy.
• Support for Helix editor themes, including a large collection of vendored themes to get you started.
• Highlight into a new String or a std::io::Write/std::fmt::Write, depending on your use case.
• Specify languages explicitly (from an enum) or look them up using a token like "rs" or "rust".
• Extremely cursed build.rs

Included Languages

Inkjet comes bundled with support for over seventy languages, and it's easy to add more - see the FAQ section.

Click to expand...

Name	Recognized Tokens
Ada	ada
Assembly (generic)	asm
Awk	awk
Bash	bash, sh, shell
BibTeX	bibtex, bib
Bicep	bicep
Blueprint	blueprint, blp
C	c, h
Cap'N Proto	capnp
Clojure	clojure, clj, cljc
C#	c_sharp, c#, csharp, cs
C++	c++, cpp, hpp, h++, cc, hh
CSS	css
Cue	cue
D	d, dlang
Dart	dart
Diff	diff
Dockerfile	dockerfile, docker
EEx	eex
Emacs Lisp	elisp, emacs-lisp, el
Elixir	ex, exs, leex
Elm	elm
Erlang	erl, hrl, es, escript
Forth	forth, fth
Fortran	fortran, for
Fish	fish
GDScript	gdscript, gd
Gleam	gleam
GLSL	glsl
Go	go, golang
Haskell	haskell, hs
HCL	hcl, terraform
HEEx	heex
HTML	html, htm
INI	ini
JavaScript	javascript, js
JSON	json
JSX	jsx
Julia	julia, jl
Kotlin	kotlin, kt, kts
LaTeX	latex, tex
LLVM	llvm
Lua	lua
GNU Make	make, makefile, mk
Markdown	markdown, md
MatLab	matlab, m
Meson	meson
Nix	nix
Objective C	objective_c, objc
OCaml	ocaml, ml
OCaml Interface	ocaml_interface, mli
OpenSCAD	openscad, scad
Pascal	pascal
PHP	php
ProtoBuf	protobuf, proto
Python	python, py
R	r
Racket	racket, rkt
Regex	regex
Ruby	ruby, rb
Rust	rust, rs
Scala	scala
Scheme	scheme, scm, ss
SCSS	scss
SQL (Generic)	sql
Swift	swift
TOML	toml
TypeScript	typescript, ts
TSX	tsx
Vimscript	vimscript, vim
WAST (WebAssembly Script)	wast
WAT (WebAssembly Text)	wat, wasm
x86 Assembly	x86asm, x86
WGSL	wgsl
YAML	yaml
Zig	zig

In addition to these languages, Inkjet also offers the Runtime and Plaintext languages.

• Runtime wraps a fn() -> &'static HighlightConfiguration pointer, which is used to resolve the language at (you guessed it) runtime.
• Plaintext enables cheap no-op highlighting. It loads the diff grammar under the hood, but provides no highlighting queries. It's aliased to none and nolang.

Cargo Features

• (Default) html - enables the bundled HTML formatter, which depends on v_htmlescape.
• (Default) theme - enables the theme API, which depends on ahash, toml and serde.
• (Default) all-languages - enables all languages.
• language-{name} - enables the specified language.
  • If you want to only enable a subset of the included languages, you'll have to set default-features=false and manually re-add each language you want to use.
• terminal - enables the termcolor-based terminal formatter, which depends on the theme feature.

FAQ

"Why is Inkjet so large?"

Parser sources generated by tree-sitter can grow quite big, with some being dozens of megabytes in size. Inkjet has to bundle these sources for all the languages it supports, so it adds up. (According to loc, there are over 23 million lines of C code!)

If you need to minimize your binary size, consider disabling languages that you don't need. Link-time optimization can also shave off a few megabytes.

"Why is Inkjet taking so long to build?"

Because it has to compile and link in dozens of C/C++ programs (the parsers and scanners for every language Inkjet bundles.)

However, after the first build, these artifacts will be cached and subsequent builds should be much faster.

"Why does highlighting require a mutable reference to the highlighter?

Under the hood, Inkjet creates a tree-sitter highlighter/parser object, which in turn dynamically allocates a chunk of working memory. Using the same highlighter for multiple simultaneous jobs would therefore cause all sorts of nasty UB.

If you want to highlight in parallel, you'll have to create a clone of the highlighter for each thread. I recommend thread_local! and RefCell if you need a quick and easy solution.

"A language I want to highlight isn't bundled with Inkjet!"

Assuming that you or someone else has implemented a highlighting-ready tree-sitter grammar for the language you want, adding it to Inkjet is easy! Just open an issue asking for it to be added, linking to the grammar repository for the language.

Alternatively, you can use Language::Runtime, which will allow you to use grammars not bundled with Inkjet.

Other notes:

• Inkjet currently only supports grammar repositories that check in the parser generated by tree-sitter (in order to avoid a build-time dependency on node/npm.)
• Inkjet requires that the grammar include (at minimum) a highlights.scm query targeted at the base tree-sitter library. Extended queries (such as those from nvim-treesitter) will not work.
• I will not support blockchain/smart contract languages like Solidity. Please take your scam enablers elsewhere.

Building

For normal use, Inkjet will compile automatically just like any other crate.

However, if you have forked the repository and want to update the bundled languages, you'll need to use GNU Make with the included Makefile:

• make redownload will wipe the languages/ directory and redownload everything from scratch.
  • Currently, this only works on *nix. You will need git, sed and wget installed. (Git clones the grammar repositories, while sed and wget are used in miniature setup scripts for some languages.)
• make regenerate will wipe src/languages.rs and regenerate it from scratch.
• make features will generate a file called features in the crate root, containing all the individual language features (ready to be pasted into Cargo.toml.)
• make themes will regenerate the mod.rs file in src/theme/vendored using the contents of the data/ directory.

If, for whatever reason, you don't have GNU Make available: you can also perform these actions manually by setting the appropriate environment variables and Cargo flags:

• INKJET_REDOWNLOAD_LANGS=true for make redownload.
• INKJET_REBUILD_LANGS_MODULE=true for make regenerate.
• INKJET_REBUILD_FEATURES=true for make features.
• INKJET_REBUILD_THEMES=true for make themes. Run cargo build --all-features with these set. (The development portions of the build script are feature gated by default.)

Acknowledgements

• Inkjet would not be possible without tree-sitter and the ecosystem of grammars surrounding it.
• Many languages are only supported thanks to the highlighting queries created by the Helix project.