Help needed updating Clojure grammar

[helena-muniz]

Hi folks,

The current grammar for clojure and its dialects in linguist is the archived one from atom and has now become a bit stale.
The good news is that the calva extension for vscode has a fresh one that is well maintained and contains 5yr of bug fixes the atom one misses.

I tried the scripts in the docs for replacing it, but seems it need a little push to find the right file. for calva it is /clojure.tmLanguage.json, after cp vendor/grammars/calva/clojure.tmLanguage.json vendor/grammars/calva/grammars/clojure.json it works

I'm not well versed in go, but it it seems to be already some structure for this in linguist but i'm not sure how to configure it.

Would be nice if the grammars could be replaced anyway as some bindings are not highlighted correctly

thanks <3

[yudin-s]

This should not require touching Go code. Linguist treats highlighting grammars as TextMate-compatible vendor grammars, and the documented replacement path is script/add-grammar --replace ..., then samples/tests.

For Clojure specifically, vendor/README.md currently lists Clojure as coming from atom/language-clojure, and grammars.yml maps vendor/grammars/language-clojure to source.clojure. So the clean PR shape would be roughly:

script/add-grammar --replace language-clojure https://github.com/BetterThanTomorrow/calva

If the script clones Calva but does not auto-detect the grammar because Calva keeps it at clojure.tmLanguage.json instead of the usual grammars/ or syntaxes/ layout, your manual experiment points to the right kind of fix: make the vendored layout contain the grammar file where Linguist's grammar tooling expects it, then update grammars.yml to point the Clojure scope at the new vendored grammar directory.

The PR should also include at least a small Clojure sample under samples/Clojure/ that demonstrates one of the highlighting cases fixed by Calva, then run:

bundle exec rake test

Two caveats that will matter for review:

• Linguist only accepts grammars with an allowed license, so include/verify Calva's grammar license.
• vendor/README.md is generated, so do not hand-edit it as the source of truth; let the grammar tooling update generated vendor metadata.

If this is the path you were looking for, please mark it as answered so the grammar replacement process is easier to find.

[lildude]

The process for changing the source of a grammar is clearly documented in the CONTRIBUTING.md file: Changing the source of a syntax highlighting grammar.

Follow those instructions and you should be good, but before you do, fix your grammar as @yudin-s suggested. It's not in the expected format for a TextMate or VSCode compatible grammar and can't be used as-is. As this is a new grammar, we will not accept changes to Linguist (ie the Go changes you hinted at) to accommodate your incorrectly laid-out grammar.