SuperHTML

HTML Language Server and Templating Language Library

HTML Language Server

The Super CLI Tool offers syntax checking and autoformatting features for HTML files.

The tool can be used either directly (for example by running it on save), or through a LSP client implementation.

$ superhtml
Usage: superhtml COMMAND [OPTIONS]

Commands:
  check         Check documents for syntax errors
  interface, i  Print a SuperHTML template's interface
  fmt           Format documents
  lsp           Start the Super LSP
  help          Show this menu and exit
  version       Print Super's version and exit

General Options:
  --help, -h   Print command specific usage

WARNING SuperHTML currently only supports UTF8-encoded HTML and assumes HTML5 compliance (e.g. doesn't support XHTML, regardless of what you define the doctype to be).

Diagnostics

This language server is stricter than the HTML spec whenever it would prevent potential human errors from being reported.

As an example, HTML allows for closing some tags implicitly. For example the following snippet is correct HTML.

<ul>
  <li> One
  <li> Two
</ul>

This will still be reported as an error by SuperHTML because otherwise the following snippet would have to be considered correct (while it's most probably a typo):

<li>item<li>

Autoformatting

The autoformatter has two main ways of interacting with it in order to request for horizontal / vertical alignment.

1. Adding / removing whitespace between the start tag of an element and its content.
2. Adding / removing whitespace between the last attribute of a start tag and the closing >.

Example of rule #1

Before:

<div> <p>Foo</p></div>

After:

<div>
    <p>Foo</p>
</div>

Reverse

Before:

<div><p>Foo</p>
</div>

After:

<div><p>Foo</p></div>

Example of rule #2

Before:

<div foo="bar" style="verylongstring" >
    Foo
</div>

After:

<div
   foo="bar"
   style="verylongstring"
>
    Foo
</div>

Reverse

Before:

<div
   foo="bar"
   style="verylongstring">
    Foo
</div>

After:

<div foo="bar" style="verylongstring">
    Foo
</div>

Editor support

VSCode

Install the Super HTML VSCode extension.

Neovim

1. Download a prebuilt version of superhtml from the Releases section (or build it yourself).

2. Put superhtml in your PATH.

3. Configure superhtml for your chosen lsp

   • Neovim Built-In

     vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd("Filetype", {
         pattern = { "html", "shtml", "htm" },
         callback = function()
             vim.lsp.start({
                 name = "superhtml",
                 cmd = { "superhtml", "lsp" },
                 root_dir = vim.fs.dirname(vim.fs.find({".git"}, { upward = true })[1])
             })
         end
     })
     

   • LspZero

     local lsp = require("lsp-zero")
     
     require('lspconfig.configs').superhtml = {
             default_config = {
                     name = 'superhtml',
                     cmd = {'superhtml', 'lsp'},
                     filetypes = {'html', 'shtml', 'htm'},
                     root_dir = require('lspconfig.util').root_pattern('.git')
             }
     }
     
     lsp.configure('superhtml', {force_setup = true})
     

Helix

In versions later than 24.07 superhtml is supported out of the box, simply add executable to your PATH.

For 24.07 and earlier, add to your .config/helix/languages.toml:

[language-server.superhtml-lsp]
command = "superhtml"
args = ["lsp"]

[[language]]
name = "html"
scope = "source.html"
roots = []
file-types = ["html"]
language-servers = [ "superhtml-lsp" ]

See https://helix-editor.com for more information on how to add new language servers.

Flow Control

Already defaults to using SuperHTML, just add the executable to your PATH.

Vim

Vim should be able to parse the errors that superhtml check [PATH]. This means that you can use :make and the quickfix window to check for syntax errors.

Set the makeprg to the following in your .vimrc:

" for any html file, a :make<cr> action will populate the quickfix menu
autocmd filetype html setlocal makeprg=superhtml\ check\ %
" if you want to use gq{motion} to format sections or the whole buffer (with gggqG)
autocmd filetype html setlocal formatprg=superhtml\ fmt\ --stdin

Other editors

Follow your editor specific instructions on how to define a new Language Server for a given language / file format.

(Also feel free to contribute more specific instructions to this readme / add files under the editors/ subdirectory).

Templating Language Library

SuperHTML is also a HTML templating language. More on that soon.

Contributing

SuperHTML tracks the latest Zig release (0.13.0 at the moment of writing).

Contributing to the HTML parser & LSP

Contributing to the HTML parser and LSP doesn't require you to be familiar with the templating language, basically limiting the scope of what you have to worry about to:

• src/cli.zig
• src/cli/
• src/html/

In particular, you will care about src/html/Tokenizer.zig and src/html/Ast.zig.

You can run zig test src/html/Ast.zig to run parser unit tests without needing to worry the rest of the project.

Running zig build will compile the Super CLI tool, allowing you to also then test the LSP behavior directly from your favorite editor.

The LSP will log in your cache directory so you can tail -f ~/.cache/super/super.log to see what happens with the LSP.