Subject: Re: bug#70361: [PATCH] Add font-locking for operators in go-ts-mode.

From: Yuan Fu <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Apr 2024 16:34:16 -0700

Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:

>> From: Noah Peart <[email-masked]>
>> Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2024 00:32:59 -0700
>> Cc: [email-masked]
>> 
>> On a somewhat related note, I was wondering why the treesit modes in emacs
>> define their `treesit-font-lock-feature-list`s in the mode definitions.
>> 
>> Wouldn't it be more user-friendly to `defvar` the feature list?
>
> AFAIR, we do that in the mode's settings because the translation of
> general categories into mode-specific settings is not easy, and
> because we want users to control that via the fontification level, not
> below that.
>
> What problems do you see with the current approach that would require
> more fine-grained user control?  And why do you think a defvar is the
> proper way of providing such control?

Replying to Noah, I don’t think there’s anything wrong for a major mode
to define a xxx-mode-feature-list and assign it to
treesit-font-lock-feature-list when setting up the major mode. We just
don’t want a central tree-sitter-font-lock-feature-list that controls
the feature list of every major mode in a single place.

But again, even if a xxx-mode defines xxx-mode-feature-list, it would be
a bit of a hassle to take out or remove a single feature from the list,
since it’s a list of list. (You can just setq the whole list, but then
you need to keep it in sync with upstream.) It’s probably easier to call
treesit-font-lock-recompute-features in the major mode hook anyway.

Yuan