nvim-treesitter plugin has been archived

[ysbaddaden]

I'm trying to setup Crystal TS in Neovim 0.12 — upgrading from 0.10 + vim-crystal.

The nvim-treesitter plugin has been archived on 3 April 2026. See https://byteiota.com/nvim-treesitter-archived-13k-star-plugin-shut-down-2026/ for reasons.

I suppose we should update the documentation? I'm trying to figure it out and will document here.

[ysbaddaden]

First, I need to figure out how to build the .so or .wasm file 😅

[ysbaddaden]

Clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/crystal-lang-tools/tree-sitter-crystal --depth 1
$ cd tree-sitter-crystal

Build the tree sitter library (parser), all you need is a C compiler (gcc, clang, ...), tree-sitter cli isn't (it's prebuilt):

$ make

Install the parser (Linux):

$ mkdir -p ~/.config/nvim/parser
$ cp libtree-sitter-crystal.so ~/.config/nvim/parser/crystal.so

Install the parser (macOS):

$ mkdir -p ~/.config/nvim/parser
$ cp libtree-sitter-crystal.dylib ~/.config/nvim/parser/crystal.dylib

Install the queries:

$ mkdir -p ~/.config/nvim/queries/crystal
$ cp queries/nvim/*.scm ~/.config/nvim/queries/crystal/

Neovim should now see the parser and the queries:

$ nvim +checkhealth
- ✅ OK Parser: crystal                   ABI: 15, path: ~/.config/nvim/parser/crystal.so
- ✅ OK crystal         aerial          ~/.config/nvim/queries/crystal
- ✅ OK crystal         context         ~/.config/nvim/queries/crystal
- ✅ OK crystal         folds           ~/.config/nvim/queries/crystal
- ✅ OK crystal         highlights      ~/.config/nvim/queries/crystal
- ✅ OK crystal         injections      ~/.config/nvim/queries/crystal

You may register the language to your init.vim (or directly to init.lua), though it might not be required:

lua << LUA
  vim.treesitter.language.register("crystal", { "cr" })
LUA

Issue: syntax highlighting still doesn't work 😭 Fixed. See below.

[ysbaddaden]

Ah. We must enable treesitter, using a ~/.config/nvim/ftplugin/crystal.lua file for example:

-- use treesitter over syntax
vim.treesitter.start()

vim.wo[0][0].foldexpr = 'v:lua.vim.treesitter.foldexpr()'

-- cleanup
vim.b.undo_ftplugin = (vim.b.undo_ftplugin or '')
  .. '\n call v:lua.vim.treesitter.stop()'
  .. '\n setl foldexpr<'

Now, syntax highlighting is working.
Folds... I don't know (I don't use them).

[ysbaddaden]

Issue: auto-indentation doesn't work anymore since I enabled treesitter.

I tried installing the indent rules from vim-crystal and :verbose set indentexpr? shows that it's correctly setup, but it still doesn't work. If I remove parser/crystal.so then it works.

I thus assume that neovim enables treesitter's indentation by default, but there are no indent.scm query and thus it doesn't work.

Any idea how to disable treesitter's indentation without nvim-treesitter?

EDIT: I missed to install the autoload/crystal/indent.vim file that is required by indent/crystal.vim, and I had to reenable syntax regexp after vim.treesitter.start() for the indentation to work by adding vim.bo.syntax = 'on' to ftplugin/crystal.lua, and indentation works again 🎉

NOTE: I tried to create a queries/crystal/indents.scm file but to no avail 🤷

[JadeKharats]

I ran into the same problem after nvim-treesitter was archived, and ended up switching to tree-sitter-manager.nvim, a lightweight actively-maintained alternative for Neovim 0.12+ (parser install/build + query copying + FileType registration, all automated).

I just opened a PR to add this Crystal grammar to its built-in language list: romus204/tree-sitter-manager.nvim#176

It pins the parser to the current HEAD of this repo and copies the queries directly from queries/nvim/, so everything described manually in this thread (build, parser install, query install) becomes a single :TSInstall crystal. Filetype detection for *.cr is already native in Neovim, and highlighting works out of the box once installed.

Might be worth mentioning in the docs as one of the post-nvim-treesitter options.