tree-grepper

Works like grep, but uses tree-sitter to search for structure instead of strings.

Installing

This isn't available packaged anywhere. That's fine, use nix:

nix-env -if https://git.bytes.zone/brian/tree-grepper/archive/main.tar.gz

Usage

Use it like grep (or really, more like ack/ag/pt/rg.)

$ tree-grepper '(import_clause (import) (upper_case_qid)@name)'
src/Main.elm:3:1:Browser
src/Main.elm:4:1:Browser.Navigation
src/main.elm:5:1:Css
...

tree-grepper uses Tree-sitter's s-expressions to find matches.

The binary name might change in the future if we find a better/shorter name. Stay tuned.

Some Terrible Benchmarks

On the first possible working version of tree-grepper:

Command	Mean Time (Hyperfine)
tree-grepper '(import_clause)@import'	17.2ms
rg -t elm '^import'	10.3ms
grep -rE '^import'	71.0ms

So this is on rg's level of quickness (which makes sense, as this tool uses their tree walking/gitignoring library.) This tool may get slower as we add features, or faster as I learn more about how to write good Rust.

Roadmap

• be able to do the thing in "Usage" above
• output JSON to make embedding in other tools nicer
• make capturing sub-matches easy (@name in the s-expression syntax)
• make this tool work on a bunch of languages, not just Elm (which I'm starting with to scratch an itch.)
• get conditionals working (#eq?, #match? from the tree-sitter docs don't work yet)
• add tests
• an option to dump a single file to the s-expression form to make writing matches easier
• man page, nice help output, etc
• produce a query from a language's syntax instead of having to write s-expressions directly
• real/reproducible benchmarks

License

TODO