tree-sitter/docs/section-8-code-navigation-systems.md

title	permalink
Code Navigation Systems	code-navigation-systems

Code Navigation Systems

Tree-sitter can be used in conjunction with its tree query language as a part of code navigation systems. An example of such a system can be seen in the tree-sitter tag command, which emits a textual dump of the interesting syntactic nodes in its file argument. This document exists to provide guidelines on the design and use of tree-sitter concepts to implement such systems.

Tagging and captures

Code navigation systems using Tree-sitter need to use queries and captures to categorize and label different syntactic nodes, such as functions, built-ins, operators, and variables. A reverse-DNS-style notation is recommended for these captures, and provide guidelines below for naming captures of a given syntax node. User applications may extend (or only recognize a subset of) these capture names, but it is desirable to standardize on the names below when supported by a given system or language.

Category	Tag
Class definitions	@definition.class
Function definitions	@definition.function
Interface definitions	@definition.interface
Method definitions	@definition.method
Module definitions	@definition.module
Function/method calls	@reference.call
Class reference	@reference.class
Interface implementation	@reference.implementation

To communicate the associated identifier inside one of these syntactic classes, capture the identifier within as @name.

tree-sitter graph

Documentation forthcoming.