I’ve been searching for a good solution to use Emacs29 with tree-sitter config in nix-darwin for quite some time.
Emacs29 comes with built-in support for Tree-Sitter, a parser generator tool and an incremental parsing library, the only requirement is the grammar files, detail in this masteringemacs article .
While there are some proposed solutions out there, such as the one found on the nixos discourse , they didn’t quite hit the mark for me. The issue was that I’m using an overridden package definition of pkgs.emacs29-macport, which complicated things a bit.
let
myEmacs = (emacsPackagesFor emacs).emacsWithPackages (epkgs: with epkgs; [
vterm
treesit-grammars.with-all-grammars
];)
in
The above treesit-grammars.with-all-grammars definition only installs the dynamic libraries. However, Emacs was still unable to find the files. The crux of the problem was that I needed to link the directory to a location that Tree-Sitter could locate.
After many trials and tribulations, I finally managed to come up with a functional solution.
Solution
pkg-emacs29-macport.nix: package definition of emacs
{ pkgs ? (import <nixpkgs> { }) }:
let
# https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport/blob/master/Formula/emacs-mac.rb
emacs29-macport = (pkgs.emacs29-macport.overrideAttrs (prevAttrs: {
patches = (prevAttrs.patches) ++ [
# patch for multi-tty support, see the following links for details
# https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/pull-requests/2/add-multi-tty-support-to-be-on-par-with/diff
# https://ylluminarious.github.io/2019/05/23/how-to-fix-the-emacs-mac-port-for-multi-tty-access/
(pkgs.fetchpatch {
url =
"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport/8b06f75ea28a68f9a490d9001ce33fd1b0d426aa/patches/emacs-mac-29-multi-tty.diff";
sha256 = "sha256-OpSYG5ew8A1IL5rW/wPwmG2bzZa8iFF+xTYQGiWjzKg=";
})
# no-title-bars
(pkgs.fetchpatch {
url =
"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport/667f0efc08506facfc6963ac1fd1d5b9b777e094/patches/emacs-26.2-rc1-mac-7.5-no-title-bar.patch";
sha256 = "sha256-f2DRcUZq8Y18n6MJ6vtChN5hLGERduMB8B1mrrds6Ns=";
})
];
})).override {
# not necessary, but enforce these options to be true
withNativeCompilation = true;
withTreeSitter = true;
};
buildEmacs = (pkgs.emacsPackagesFor emacs29-macport).emacsWithPackages;
treesitGrammars =
(pkgs.emacsPackagesFor emacs29-macport).treesit-grammars.with-all-grammars;
in {
emacs = buildEmacs (epkgs: with epkgs; [ vterm treesitGrammars ]);
treesitGrammars = treesitGrammars;
}
config-emacs.nix: configuraiton of emacs
{ pkgs, config, lib, ... }:
let
emacs29 = (pkgs.callPackage ./pkg-emacs29-macport.nix { });
in {
home.packages = lib.mkBefore ([ emacs29.emacs ]);
home.file = {
# tree-sitter subdirectory of the directory specified by user-emacs-directory
".config/emacs/.local/cache/tree-sitter".source =
"${emacs29.treesitGrammars}/lib";
};
}
Tree-sitter language grammars are distributed as dynamic libraries. In order to use a language grammar in Emacs, you need to make sure that the dynamic library is installed on the system. Emacs looks for language grammars in several places, in the following order: first, in the list of directories specified by the variable treesit-extra-load-path; then, in the tree-sitter subdirectory of the directory specified by user-emacs-directory (see The Init File); and finally, in the system’s default locations for dynamic libraries.
Finally use this config-emacs.nix in your home.nix using home-manager
imports = [
./config-emacs.nix
]