indent-bars: fast, configurable indentation guide-bars for Emacs.

FAQ ⏐ INSTALL ⏐ CUSTOMIZE ⏐ MORE DETAILS

This package provides indentation guide bars in Emacs, enhanced by tree-sitter:

• Uses stipple face properties with font-lock for fast performance.
• Optional tree-sitter support, including scope focus, among other features.
• Supports either space or tab-based indentation.
• Bar appearance is highly configurable: color, blending, width, position within the character, vertical fill/blank pattern, even zigzag (see examples).
• Bars can have optional depth-based coloring, with a cyclical color palette you can customize.
• Fast current-depth bar highlighting with configurable bar color and/or appearance changes.
• Bars can appear on blank lines.
• Bar depth can be held constant inside multi-line strings and lists.
• Works in the terminal, using a vertical bar character.

What's New

• v0.5.2: Ensure all old tree-sitter scopes regions are correctly invalidated when the scope is updated.
• v0.5.1: Correctly handle tree-sitter scope highlight when multiple windows show the same buffer.
• v0.5: A major new release with many added features and improvements.
  • Stipple-based bars are now free from artifacts when the same buffer appears in multiple windows.
  • Position-aware tree-sitter scope focus with fully configurable out-of-scope styling.
  • Theme-awareness: bar styling gets updated on theme change (e.g. for depth-based colors).
  • Two new highlight selection "methods" including a new default ("context").
  • Inhibit string and list bar descent without tree-sitter, using Emacs' syntax capabilities.
• v0.2.2:
  • Rate-limit updates of the current highlight depth; see indent-bars-depth-update-delay.
• v0.2:
  • ability to configure the starting column (including col 0)
  • Support for tab-based indent modes
  • optional character-based indent bars (automatic in terminal)
  • tree-sitter context-aware bar depth
  • additional mode support: go-mode, go-ts-mode, cobol-mode
  • other minor improvements
• v0.1: Initial stipple-based indentation.

FAQ's

• I don't see anything/bars are garbled!
  While most do, not all Emacsen support stipples; see Compatibility.
• How can I find out if my Emacs supports stipples?!
  See Testing Stipples.
• These bars are too instrusive!
  Reduce the :blend value in indent-bars-color closer to zero. Consider disabling indent-bars-color-by-depth.
• I can barely see the bars!
  Increase the :blend value in indent-bars-color closer to one.
• I want completely unique indent guidebars so as to flex on my colleagues!
  Check the Examples for some ideas. The sky is the limit (submit your examples).
• I use Emacs on the terminal, you insensitive clod!
  indent-bars will just work for you (though you don't get any fancy bar patterns).
• I use graphical Emacs, but am an extreme minimalist. All my outfits are gray. Including my socks.
  Maybe this will suit you? Otherwise, you can turn off the stipple and use old fashioned │ characters with indent-bars-prefer-character.
• I get too many bars inside function definitions and calls:
  You can turn on indent-bars-no-descend-lists or even use tree-sitter to help.
• I want a bar in the very first column!:
  Set indent-bars-starting-column to 0.
• The current bar highlight is so fast, but it flashes too rapidly during scrolling!
  Update to v0.2.2 or later and set indent-bars-depth-update-delay to a comfortable number like 0.1s (0.075s is the default). If you like the crazy-fast updates, set this to 0.
• I turned on treesitter support but nothing happened:
  You need to configure indent-bars-treesit-scope (and possibly wrap) for your language(s) of interest. More info.
• How can I change the style of the out-of-scope bars?:
  Using a parallel set of ts- customizations.

Install/config

Not yet in a package database; simply clone and point use-package at the correct path. You can also simply use the vc-package-install command newly released with Emacs 29.

(use-package indent-bars
  :load-path "~/code/emacs/indent-bars"
  :hook ((python-mode yaml-mode) . indent-bars-mode)) ; or whichever modes you prefer

Straight

To clone with use-package and straight:

(use-package indent-bars
  :straight (indent-bars :type git :host github :repo "jdtsmith/indent-bars")
  :hook ((python-mode yaml-mode) . indent-bars-mode)) ; or whichever modes you prefer

With tree-sitter support

(use-package indent-bars
  :load-path "~/code/emacs/indent-bars"
  :config
  (require 'indent-bars-ts) 		; not needed with straight
  :custom
  (indent-bars-treesit-support t)
  (indent-bars-treesit-ignore-blank-lines-types '("module"))
  ;; Add other languages as needed
  (indent-bars-treesit-scope '((python function_definition class_definition for_statement
	  if_statement with_statement while_statement)))
  ;; wrap may not be needed if no-descend-list is enough
  ;;(indent-bars-treesit-wrap '((python argument_list parameters ; for python, as an example
  ;;				      list list_comprehension
  ;;				      dictionary dictionary_comprehension
  ;;				      parenthesized_expression subscript)))
  :hook ((python-base-mode yaml-mode) . indent-bars-mode))

See tree-sitter, and also the Wiki page.

Compatibility

Important

For indent-bars to display fancy guide bars, your port and version of emacs must correctly display the :stipple face attribute. Most do, but some do not.

Known :stipple support, by Emacs build:

• Linux:
  • "Pure GTK" (--with-pgtk build flag) versions support stipples, but had a display bug that caused them to appear incorrectly (as reverse video) and lead to crashes; this was fixed in Emacs here and will presumably be released with Emacs 30.
  • Cairo builds (--with-cairo) have been reported not to display stipples.
  • All other builds do support stipples.
• Mac: The emacs-mac¹ port has stipple support, but others do not. M-x version should say Carbon, not NS.
• Windows: Emacs on Windows does not (apparently) support stipples.
• Terminal: Stipples are not supported on terminal emacs.

Please open an issue with any updates/corrections to this list. See also Testing Stipples.

indent-bars can also be used without stipples, drawing a simple vertical character (like │) instead. It automatically does this in non-graphical displays (terminals), but this can be made the default; see Character Display.

Customization

M-x customize-group indent-bars is the easiest way to customize everything about the appearance and function of indent-bars (check sub-groups too).

Note

When changing any of these custom variables while indent-bars is enabled, you must M-x indent-bars-reset in the buffers of interest to see the resulting changes.

See some examples with relevant settings.

The main customization variables are categorized below. See the documentation of each variable for more details.

Bar colors

Custom variables for configuring bar color, including rotating depth-based palette:

• indent-bars-color: The main bar color, either a color name or face, from which foreground or background color will be taken. Also used to set a :blend factor, to blend colors into the frame's background color.
• indent-bars-color-by-depth: How and whether to alter the color of the indent bars by indentation depth. Defaults to using the foreground of the outline-* faces, but many options are possible.

Bar shape and size

Variables affecting the visual appearance of bars (color aside):

• indent-bars-width-frac: The fractional width of the bar ([0-1], a fraction of a single character's width).
• indent-bars-pad-frac: The fractional padding offset of the bar from the left edge of the character.
• indent-bars-pattern: A string specifying the vertical structure of the bar (space=blank, non-space=filled). Scaled to the height of one character.
• indent-bars-zigzag: A fractional left-right zigzag to apply to consecutive groups of identical non-space characters in pattern.

Current Depth highlighting

Configuration for highlighting the current indentation bar depth:

• indent-bars-highlight-current-depth: How and whether to highlight the bars at the indentation depth of the current line. The current depth bar can change color (including blending with the pre-existing color), as well as structure (size, pad, pattern, zigzag).
• indent-bars-highlight-selection-method: Method used to select which bar is highlighted. The default ('context) considers surrounding lines for a more natural selection depth.
• indent-bars-depth-update-delay: Delay in seconds after which depth highlighting occurs.

Bar setup and location

Configuration variables for bar position and line locations (including on blank lines):

• indent-bars-starting-column: column to use for the first bar. Can be set in special modes which start at an unusual fixed offset, or set to 0 to get "column 0" bars.
• indent-bars-spacing-override: Normally the number of spaces for indentation is automatically discovered from the mode and other variables. If that doesn't work for any reason, it can be explicitly set using this variable.
• indent-bars-display-on-blank-lines: Whether to display bars on blank lines.
• indent-bars-no-descend-string: Whether to inhibit increasing depth inside of strings.
• indent-bars-no-descend-list: Whether to inhibit increasing depth inside of lists.

Character-based bars and terminal

Custom variables affecting character-based bar display, e.g. in the terminal:

• indent-bars-prefer-character: Use characters to display the vertical bar instead of stipples. This occurs automatically on non-graphical displays (terminals), but this variable can be used to always prefer character-based display.
• indent-bars-no-stipple-char: The character to use when stipples are unavailable or disabled. Defaults to the vertical box character │. Other good options include ┃, ┋, and ║.
• indent-bars-no-stipple-char-font-weight: Optional font weight to use for the face displaying the no-stipple character.
• indent-bars-unspecified-bg|fg-color: Colors to use for the frame background and default foreground when they are unspecified (e.g. in terminals). If you intend to use indent-bars in the terminal, set to the terminal background/foreground colors you use.

Tree-sitter

For more information, check the details.

Main treesitter configuration variables

• indent-bars-treesit-support: Whether to use tree-sitter (if available) to (optionally) highlight the current scope and help determine bar depth.
• indent-bars-treesit-scope: A mapping of language to tree-sitter scope node types (as symbols), for local scope highlight (aka scope focus).
• indent-bars-treesit-scope-min-lines: The minimum number of lines a scope node must occupy to be considered a valid scope.
• indent-bars-treesit-update-delay: Delay in seconds for updating the treesitter scope highlight.
• indent-bars-treesit-wrap: A mapping of language to tree-sitter wrap types (as symbols), to avoid adding extra bars e.g. in wrapped function arguments. Note that this is considered only after the no-descend options above.
• indent-bars-treesit-ignore-blank-lines-types: A list of tree-sitter node types (as strings) inside of which to inhibit styling blank lines at, like "module".

Tree-sitter out-of-scope alternate styling variables

If tree-sitter and scope focus are active (indent-bars-treesit-scope), the style and highlight settings above apply only to the in-scope bars. You can separately configure the appearance of the out-of-scope bars — i.e. the bars outside the current tree-sitter scope. Usually you'd want to de-emphasize out-of-scope bars somehow, but that's not required (go crazy). To customize bar appearance outside the current scope, use the parallel set of custom variables with an indent-bars-ts- prefix. Each of these variables can be set similarly to their in-scope counterparts to fully configure out-of-scope bar appearance, including color, depth highlighting, bar pattern, etc.

Note

Scope focus highlighting is completely independent of depth highlighting, and you can enable one or the other, or both.

The ts parallel custom variables for out-of-scope styling are:

• [I] indent-bars-ts-color
• indent-bars-ts-width-frac
• indent-bars-ts-pad-frac
• indent-bars-ts-pattern
• indent-bars-ts-zigzag
• indent-bars-ts-no-stipple-char-font-weight
• [I] indent-bars-ts-color-by-depth
• [I] indent-bars-ts-highlight-current-depth

Each of these parallel variables has the same form as their equivalent non-ts version (the "parent" variable), with two difference:

1. Some (marked with [I] above) can optionally use inheritance from their parent. Inheritance means any missing :key based elements are inherited from the in-scope (parent) style. To configure their inheritance, you can optionally set these variable values to a cons cell of the form ([no-]inherit . value), where value has the normal format for the parent variable. inherit (the default, if the cons cell is omitted and value is simply used as-is) means that any unspecified :key values are inherited from the parent variable. The symbol no-inherit means to omit any missing key values when styling out-of-scope bars.
2. For any non-:key type values, the specific symbol value 'unspecified can be set to indicate using the parent's value for that slot.

For example, a setting of:

(setopt indent-bars-ts-color '(inherit unspecified :blend 0.15))

means to configure the color of out-of-scope bars as follows:

1. use the color from the parent variable indent-bars-color (since it is unspecified here)
2. set :blend to 0.15
3. inherit any other missing keyword values from indent-bars-color

The easiest way to configure inheritance and unspecified values in the ts variables is via the customize interface; see the group indent-bars-ts-style.

Details and Caveats

Indentation

indent-bars works with either space- or tab-based indentation. If possible, prefer space indentation, as it is faster. Note that some modes explicitly enable or disable indent-tabs-mode.

Current Depth Highlight

indent-bars can highlight the bar at the current depth, and supports a few different ways to determine which bar gets selected for highlight (see indent-bars-highlight-selection-method):

1. nil: The simplest version selects the depth of the last-visible bar on the current line for highlight.
2. on-bar: The old default, which selects the depth of the "unseen" bar that the first character of text on the current line covers up.
3. context: The new default, which selects the last-visible bar unless an adjacent non-blank line is indented deeper by at least one indent spacing, in which case the on-bar approach is used.

Experiment with these to see what you prefer.

Tree-sitter Details

indent-bars can optionally use tree-sitter in supported files to enable several features:

1. Scope Focus: The current tree-sitter scope can be focused, with out-of-scope bars de-emphasized in their display (or actually, styled however you want). This can be configured by specifying matching "scope" node types (e.g. functions, blocks, etc.) for each language of interest. The innermost node (covering sufficient lines) will then be rendered using the normal bar color and style. Bars which are out-of-scope have alternative styling applied.
2. Selective Blank Line Display: By default, indent-bars displays bars on blank lines (though this can be configured), so that they remain continuous. It can be nice to omit the display of blank lines bars at the top structural level (e.g. in a module), to make divisions between top-level constructs more visible. Tree-sitter can help indent-bars identify those lines.
3. Wrap Detection: It can be useful to prevent excess bars inside wrapped entities which move indent to "line things up." These include things like argument lists, literal dictionaries, or other heirarchical multi-line structures. Tree-sitter can help detect these and inhibit unwanted bars (but see also indent-bars-no-descend-string/list, which do not require tree-sitter).

Note

indent-bars' tree-sitter capabilities require Emacs 29 or later built with tree-sitter support, and the appropriate tree-sitter grammars installed for your languages of interest. Additional node type configuration by language required; see below.

Configuring tree-sitter

Scope

Simply configure indent-bars-treesit-scope with the node types for which "local scope" highlighting nodes are of interest. This must be done for each tree-sitter language you use. This scope could be as granular as classes and functions, or include detailed block statements. You can disable scoping for "short blocks" using indent-bars-treesit-scope-min-lines, so that, e.g., a quick if statement does not capture scope. I recommend starting with the minimal possible set of node types, adding as needed.

Wrap

indent-bars-treesit-wrap can be configured in a similar manner (mapping language to wrapping node types). Note that the default of indent-bars-no-descend-list, which does not require tree-sitter, may be sufficient for your uses.

Ignore certain blank lines

You can assign a single (usually top-level) node type to ignore when drawing bars on blanks linkes; see indent-bars-treesit-ignore-blank-lines-types (which, please note, is configured as a list of strings, unlike indent-bars-treesit-wrap/scope).

Identifying treesit node types of interest

The easiest way to discover node types of interest (in a buffer with working treesit support) is to M-x treesit-explore-mode. Then simply highlight the beginning of a line of interest, and look in the treesitter explorer buffer which pops up for the names of obvious nodes in the tree. Add these types to indent-bars-treesit-scope/wrap for the language of interest, then M-x indent-bars-reset and see how you did.

Please document good tree-sitter settings for other languages in the Wiki.

Moving by columns

If indent-bars-display-on-blank-lines is set, the newline at the end of blank lines may have a 'display property set to show the bars. Emacs does not deal correctly with display properties containing newlines when moving by columns. This is not normally a problem, but in one instance it is a nuisance: evil-mode tries to "preserve" column during line moves, so can trigger this emacs misfeature. The symptom is that point jumps a line and moves over as you move down with evil. A solution is here.

Display

Stipples

Stipples are repeating bitmap patterns anchored to the full emacs frame. indent-bars basically "opens windows" on this fixed pattern to "reveal" the bars.

The fast stipple method used for drawing bars enables lots of interesting patterns.

Testing Stipples

If you are experiencing issues with stipple bar display (missing, garbled, etc.), and would like to determine if stipples are working correctly in your build of emacs, you can test it as follows.

1. In the *scratch* buffer, use first M-x font-lock-mode to disable fontification
2. Hit C-x C-e just after the last ) in the following code:

   (let* ((w (window-font-width))
          (stipple `(,w 1 ,(apply #'unibyte-string
   			       (append (make-list (1- (/ (+ w 7) 8)) ?\0)
   				       '(1))))))
     (insert "\n" (propertize (concat  (make-string 15 ?\s)
   				    "THIS IS A TEST"
   				    (make-string 15 ?\s))
                              'face `(:background "red" :foreground "blue" :stipple ,stipple))))

This should then look something like (note the blue vertical bars):

If you determine that stipples do not work in your version of Emacs, consider upgrading to a version which supports them, reporting the bug, or setting indent-bars-prefer-character=t.

Per-buffer stipple offsets

To get the stipple bars to appear in the correct location within their column, indent-bars must consider the starting horizontal pixel position of the current window, and "rotate" the stipple pattern accordingly. It does this automatically, per buffer, so you shouldn't ever notice problems, even when re-sizing or re-arranging windows, changing font size, etc. Until v0.5, showing the same buffer side by side in Emacs versions which support pixel-level window width/offsets could lead to unexpected bar artifacts, since the offset applies per-buffer, not per-window. In v0.5, an alternate method for applying the stipple pattern was used to solve this.

Character display

For terminals, (and everywhere, if indent-bars-prefer-character is set), indent-bars will not attempt stipple display, but instead use simple characters (e.g. │; see an example).

Note that in mixed gui/terminal sessions of the same Emacs process, you need to M-x indent-bars-reset when switching a given buffer between graphical and terminal frames.

Advantages/Disadvantages

Advantages of stipples

• Highly customized appearance and position within the character is possible — examples.
• Fastest option: does not need to apply display properties for normal lines with space-based indentation.
• Results in continuous lines even when line-spacing is non-nil (vs. gaps with box characters and additional line spacing).

Advantages of character bar display

• Works equally for terminal and GUI.
• Works even for emacs ports which do not support or mis-handle stipple display (see Compatibility).

Speed

indent-bars was in part motivated by the inefficiency of older indentation highlight modes, and is designed for speed. It uses stipples (fixed bitmap patterns) and font lock for fast and efficient bar drawing — faces on spaces. Highlighting the current indentation level is essentially free, since it works by filtered remapping the relevant face.

The heaviest operations are tree-sitter support (especially scope highlighting), and blank-line highlighting. If you experience any speed issues, these are the first settings to experiment with. Using with tab-based indentation is also slightly slower than with space-based.

Both indentation-depth highlighting and current-tree-sitter-scope highlighting are protected by timers to avoid unnecessary loads (e.g. when pixel-scrolling). Note that indentation-depth highlighting is very fast and can safely be set to 0 seconds (though bars will then flash rapidly as you scroll). Tree-sitter scope requires querying the tree-sitter core, which can be somewhat slower, so be careful setting its timer too low.

Related Packages

• indent-guide: An older package that uses overlays with | characters. Some reports of performance concerns. Incompatible with company and other related in-buffer modes.
• highlight-indentation-mode: Uses overlays to draw indentation guides, and includes a current indentation mode. Partial support for blank line guides.
• highlight-indent-guides: a highly configurable mode for indentation highlight, with color and style options, as well as current depth highlighting.
• hl-indent-scope: Highlights indentation based on language scope - requiring support for each language, uses overlays to draw indentation guides.
• visual-indentation-mode: Full character-based alternating color indentation guides. Package is now archived.

Why a new package?

None of the existing packages:

1. were fast enough with large files (including current depth highlighting)
2. had enough guide appearance configurability
3. were able to support depth-based coloring
4. offered robust support for guides on blank lines
5. had tree-sitter capabilities

Acknowledgments

I'm grateful for in-depth advice and input on the design of indent-bars from Eli Zaretski, Stefan Monnier, Dmitry Gutov and many other who opened issues and PRs.

highlight-indentation-mode was a source of good ideas, and indent-bars adapts the indentation guessing function from this mode. The original idea of using stipples for "better" indent-bars came from this comment by @vlcek.

Footnotes

1. Most easily installed with brew. ↩