A modern ctags on tree-sitter

Every ask, newest first

Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.

Reader’s note. Some want LSP-based refactoring rather than tree-sitter.

1. Mar 2026Wants an offline, ctags-like code navigation tool built on Tree-sitter, since language servers are inconsistent. Read it: a comment in “The Future of SCIP”
2. Apr 2025Wants a Vim plugin to jump between Python code blocks, such as block starts and ends. Read it: a comment in “Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim”
3. Mar 2024Wonders why no language-agnostic intermediate representation or data flow layer exists on top of Tree-sitter. Read it: a comment in “Let's create a Tree-sitter grammar”
4. Jan 2024Wants a viewer showing the syntax tree of any code snippet in any language, to learn functional languages. Read it: a comment in “Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source”
5. Aug 2023Shares shell helper scripts, like timestamping command output and recursive text replace; no tool request. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: Share a shell script you like”
6. Feb 2022Wants a tag-based code navigation system for JavaScript and TypeScript; language servers hog memory and CPU. Read it: a comment in “Building an Intelligent Emacs”
7. Feb 2022Wants a tool running syntax-tree transforms from snippet templates, like adding imports, interfaces and methods automatically. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Are there AST aware templating programs / snippets?”
8. Jan 2022Wants better tools for navigating large C codebases with unclear outside dependencies and little documentation. Read it: a comment in “BCHS: OpenBSD, C, httpd and SQLite web stack”
9. Dec 2021Wants an open-source code cross-referencer like Chromium Code Search or Bootlin Elixir. Read it: a comment in “Hacking the Go compiler to add a new keyword”
10. Feb 2021Wants more easy-to-set-up, editor-agnostic cscope-like code navigation tools for other languages. Read it: a comment in “On navigating a large codebase”
11. May 2017Wants more refactoring tools built on proper semantic analysis of syntax trees. Read it: a comment in “Code as text is a problem”
12. May 2014Wants a cscope successor for C with terminal and Vim or Emacs queries, definition jumping and callers lookup. Read it: a comment in “Sourcegraph: "A single example is worth 1000 lines of documentation"”
13. May 2013Wants to navigate a program by its syntax tree rather than lines and characters. Read it: a comment in “Ydiff: Structural Comparison of Programs”