Neovim and Tree-Sitter Post-Archival

On April 3rd, 2026, the lauded nvim-treesitter was archived, due to maintainer burnout.¹ This post introduces tree-sitter-dl, a simple Python script I wrote to replace one of the primary functionalities of nvim-treesitter: parser installation. My goals for the script were the following:

• Easy to use
• No dependencies, other than the obvious ones²
• Flexible
• Fast enough

If you want to get started using tree-sitter-dl, check out the GitHub repository. In the rest of this post, I will go over the main features of the script.

Overview

I will walk through installing a parser for the Zig programming language. Basic parser installation looks like this:

./tree-sitter-dl.py install zig

This will install parsers, queries, and a lock file into the following locations depending on your OS:

This should be the location of your Neovim config directory. If you would like to specify an installation location instead, use the -o option:

./tree-sitter-dl.py install zig -o my-install-dir

Make sure that the installation location is in your Neovim runtimepath so that Neovim can find it!³ Now try editing a .zig file with this content:

const std = @import("std");

pub fn main(init: std.process.Init) !void {
    std.debug.print("All your {s} are belong to us.\n", .{"codebase"});
}

You shouldn't see any tree-sitter highlights yet! To activate them, run :lua vim.treesitter.start()! If you want to automate this process, the following into ftplugin/zig.lua:⁴

vim.treesitter.start()
-- Uncomment if you want tree-sitter folding
-- vim.wo[0][0].foldexpr = 'v:lua.vim.treesitter.foldexpr()'
-- vim.wo[0][0].foldmethod = 'expr'

Specific Parser Repositories

Many languages have multiple different tree-sitter parser implementations. For example, for Lua, there's:

• Azganoth/tree-sitter-lua
• tjdevries/tree-sitter-lua
• tree-sitter-grammars/tree-sitter-lua

tree-sitter-dl will automatically try to select the best implementation. If you have a specific implementation in mind, though, you can run something like:

./tree-sitter-dl.py install lua:https://github.com/Azganoth/tree-sitter-lua

If you want to get more specific, like retrieving a specfic version, run:

# Tag
./tree-sitter-dl.py install lua:https://github.com/Azganoth/tree-sitter-lua@v2.1.3
# Commit SHA
./tree-sitter-dl.py install lua:https://github.com/Azganoth/tree-sitter-lua@7ab58496586502285a944e380b2cf05339035844
# Branch
./tree-sitter-dl.py install lua:https://github.com/Azganoth/tree-sitter-lua@shebang-magic

This flexibility is important for some parsers. For exmaple, I personally use the following to install my Python parser:

./tree-sitter-dl.py install python:https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-python@v0.25.0

Uninstalling

Run the following to uninstall parser(s):

./tree-sitter-dl.py uninstall zig

DO NOT REMOVE THE PARSER FILES YOURSELF! Trying to do so might mess up the lock file that tree-sitter-dl maintains.

WebAssembly

By default, parsers are shared libraries (i.e. .so, .dll, or .dylib files). Thus, you should only install trusted parsers from trusted sources on your machine, because if a parser is run, it can do anything it wants (under your user permissions).

However, if your parser is bundled as a WebAssembly module, you can achieve both portability and safety. tree-sitter-dl supports this:

./tree-sitter-dl.py install zig --wasm

Note that, to use WebAssembly parsers, Neovim must be built with ENABLE_WASMTIME. Check out the Neovim docs for building from source. Fair warning: this feature is somewhat incomplete; I ran into numerous different crashes while running Neovim like this.⁵

Listing Installed Parsers

Installed parsers can be listed like this:

./tree-sitter-dl.py list

It is useful to use the -v flag for more detailed output:

./tree-sitter-dl.py list -v

Wrap Up

I hope this post was helpful! If you interested in tree-sitter-dl, check out the GitHub repository. The script is not perfect, but I hope it gets the job done for you.

As always, if you had questions, comments, or issues with this post, let me know by posting an issue.