Setting Up Treesitter For Neovim Without Plugin

this guide assumes that you already have the treesitter parser or know how to build the treesitter parser. if you dont, i suggest you to read the treesitter docs

Setting up the parser

to make Neovim recognise the parser, you need to place it in the {nvim_runtime_path}/parser/{lang}.so. nvim_runtime_path is one of the following:

• $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/nvim/
• $XDG_DATA_HOME/nvim/site the config_home and data_home is typically in ~/.config/ and ~/local/share/ respectively.

you can place it in either directory, the only difference is that the config directory will be sourced first. i suggest to put it in the local/share directory because thats what everyone do. so for example if you have treesitter markdown parser, the path would be like this ~/.local/share/nvim/site/parser/markdown.so

now that the parser has been set up, we need to set the queries files to get syntax highlighting to work.

Setting up syntax highlighting

the queries is basically a rule for syntax highlighting (similar to css if you know that). the [nvim-treesitter] plugin provides good written queries that we can use. navigate to the queries folder in the github repo and find the language that you want, then you can download it and put it to the path.

the path for the queries is {nvim_runtime_path}/queries/{lang}/. notice that the {lang} is a directory, not a file. inside this directory is where you put the queries files.

after you do that, you can activate the syntax highlighting using this command :lua vim.treesitter.start(). make sure the buffer filetype is correct, if not, you can set it with :set ft={lang}.

to start the treesitter automatically, you can make autocmd or put the previous lua code in ftplugin/. i personally like putting it in ftplugin.

-- ~/.config/nvim/ftplugin/{lang}.lua
vim.treesitter.start()

More info

if you have problem after following this guide, its best to consult the neovim docs :h treesitter, :h runtimepath, :h ftplugins.
to build the treesitter parser, you can read the treesitter docs#getting-started