Incremental AST selection with Neovim and Treesitter

post.md

Something I really miss when working with non-Lisp languages is the ability to easily manipulate portions of code programatically.

Vim has, historically, provided text objects as a way to address that need. They're quite useful, but lack awareness of language-specific constructs—those would require a languag-aware parser.

I have recently learned that nvim-treesitter, being particularly well positioned to solve that problem (since it keeps the AST representation), provides some of that functionality natively:

require'nvim-treesitter.configs'.setup {
  incremental_selection = {
    enable = true,
    keymaps = {
      init_selection = "gnn", -- set to `false` to disable one of the mappings
      node_incremental = "grn",
      scope_incremental = "grc",
      node_decremental = "grm",
    },
  },
}

The default mappings might be a bit awkward. A user on reddit has suggested a different set of mappings that might be more convenient.

This setup has been making my life much easier when editing deeply nested TypeScript expressions.