NMF AnyText Generator

This Yeoman generator is used to create a new AnyText extension for VS Code. AnyText is a language workbench with an incremental packrat parser supporting left recursions, so you do not have to worry about left recursion or an interaction between lexer and parser when designing your language.

Prerequisites

AnyText requires a .NET 8 or .NET 9 SDK to be installed. To install it, follow the instructions provided by Microsoft. Then, the generator itself can be installed via NPM. We recommend a systemwide installation.

npm install generator-anytext --global --save-dev

Using the generator

The code generator scaffolds a new AnyText project. You can start it via the command line as follows:

yo anytext

This will ask you a range of questions, like the name of your language and a repository link. Based on this information, the code generator will generate a new directory with the following artifacts already set up for you:

• An AnyText grammar document with an example grammar
• A file to manually fine-tune editor services for the generated parser
• A C# project that creates an LSP server of your grammar
• A Visual Studio Code extension that integrates the LSP server
• Visual Studio Code launch configurations such that you can easily debug your VS Code extension

These artifacts are set up such that they integrate with each other. For example, the build directory of the LSP server is exactly where the VS Code extension is expecting it. Because the code generator also compiles the sources, you can start the extension straight away. Also, you can immediately use vsce to pack your extension into a deployable VSIX file.

The extension project also contains scripts that allow you to easily regenerate the grammar and metamodel code once you did some changes:

• If you only changed the concrete syntax of your language, you can run npm run generate-parser to regenerate the internal parser DSL code of your language.
• If you changed the abstract syntax of your language, you can run npm run generate-metamodel to regenerate the code for your changed metamodel.

Launching the new extension

Because the code generator produces launch configurations for Visual Studio Code, you can easily start the extension via the Run and Debug section of Visual Studio Code when opening the newly created directory in Visual Studio Code.