Rainbow delimiters for Neovim

This Neovim plugin provides alternating syntax highlighting (“rainbow parentheses”) for Neovim, powered by Tree-sitter. The goal is to have a hackable plugin which allows for different configuration of queries and strategies, both globally and per file type. Users can override and extend the built-in defaults through their own configuration.

This is a fork of nvim-ts-rainbow2, which was implemented as a module for nvim-treessiter. However, since nvim-treesitter has deprecated the module system I had to create this standalone plugin.

Installation and setup

Installation

Install it like any other Neovim plugin. You will need a Tree-sitter parser for each language you want to use rainbow delimiters with.

Setup

Configuration is done by setting entries in the Vim script dictionary g:rainbow_delimiters. Here is an example for the default configuration:

let g:rainbow_delimiters = {
    \ 'strategy': {
        \ '': rainbow_delimiters#strategy.global,
        \ 'vim': rainbow_delimiters#strategy.local,
    \ },
    \ 'query': {
        \ '': 'rainbow-delimiters',
        \ 'lua': 'rainbow-blocks',
    \ },
    \ 'highlight': [
        \ 'RainbowDelimiterRed',
        \ 'RainbowDelimiterYellow',
        \ 'RainbowDelimiterBlue',
        \ 'RainbowDelimiterOrange',
        \ 'RainbowDelimiterGreen',
        \ 'RainbowDelimiterViolet',
        \ 'RainbowDelimiterCyan',
    \ ],
\ }

The equivalent code in Lua:

-- This module contains a number of default definitions
local rainbow_delimiters = require 'rainbow-delimiters'

vim.g.rainbow_delimiters = {
    strategy = {
        [''] = rainbow_delimiters.strategy['global'],
        vim = rainbow_delimiters.strategy['local'],
    },
    query = {
        [''] = 'rainbow-delimiters',
        lua = 'rainbow-blocks',
    },
    highlight = {
        'RainbowDelimiterRed',
        'RainbowDelimiterYellow',
        'RainbowDelimiterBlue',
        'RainbowDelimiterOrange',
        'RainbowDelimiterGreen',
        'RainbowDelimiterViolet',
        'RainbowDelimiterCyan',
    },
}

Please refer to the manual for more details. For those who prefer a setup function there is the module rainbow-delimiters.setup.

Help wanted

There are only so many languages which I understand to the point that I can write queries for them. If you want support for a new language please consider contributing code. See the CONTRIBUTING for details.

Status of the plugin

Tree-sitter support in Neovim is still experimental. This plugin and its API should be considered stable insofar as breaking changes will only happen if changes to Neovim necessitates them.

Warning

There is currently a shortcoming in Neovim's Tree-sitter API which makes it so that only the first node of a capture group can be highlighted. Please see neovim/neovim#17099 for details. Affected queries:

• HTML rainbow-delimiters
• JSX (Javascript + React.js) rainbow-delimiters-react (affects React tags only)
• Python (rainbow-delimiters) (affects only the for ... in inside comprehensions)
• TSX (Typescript + React.js) rainbow-delimiters-react (affects React tags only)
• Vue.js rainbow-delimiters

Most of these are related to HTML-like tags, so you can use an alternative query instead. See the manual (:h ts-rainbow-query) for a list of extra queries.

Screenshots

Bash

C

Common Lisp

Java

LaTeX

Using the blocks query to highlight the entire \begin and \end instructions.

License

Licensed under the Apache-2.0 license. Please see the LICENSE file for details.

Migrating from nvim-ts-rainbow2

Rainbow-Delimiters uses different settings than nvim-ts-rainbow2, but converting the configuration is straight-forward. The biggest change is where the settings are stored.

• Settings are stored in the global variable g:rainbow-delimiters, which has the same keys as the old settings
• The default strategy and query have index '' (empty string) instead of 1
• Default highlight groups have the prefix RainbowDelimiter instead of TSRainbow, e.g. RainbowDelimiterRed instead of TSRainbowRed
• The default query is now called rainbow-delimiters instead of rainbow-parens
• The public Lua module is called rainbow-delimiters instead of ts-rainbow

The name of the default query is now rainbow-delimiters because for some languages like HTML the notion of "parentheses" does not make any sense. In HTML the only meaningful delimiter is the tag. Hence the generic notion of a "delimiter".

Attribution

This is a fork of a previous Neovim plugin, the original repository is available under https://sr.ht/~p00f/nvim-ts-rainbow/.

Attributions from the original author

Huge thanks to @vigoux, @theHamsta, @sogaiu, @bfredl and @sunjon and @steelsojka for all their help