AppleScript

AppleScript for Zed

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AppleScript language support for the Zed editor.

Install

From inside Zed: cmd-shift-P → zed: extensions → search for AppleScript → Install.

Features

• Syntax highlighting (line + block comments, strings, numbers, operators, command names, parameters, handlers, control flow, ObjC-bridge calls, raw-data literals, date literals, …)
• Code outline (handlers, properties, script objects, tell targets, use imports)
• Auto-indent for every block form (tell, if, repeat, try, considering, ignoring, with timeout, with transaction, using terms from, script)
• Bracket matching for (), {}, (* *), ""
• Vim text objects — @function, @class, @comment (line and block forms)
• Run scripts from the editor: full-file run, individual handler, or compile to .scpt
• Language injection — Bash inside do shell script "…"; AppleScript or JavaScript-for-Automation inside run script "…" based on content sniffing; AppleScript inside markdown fences
• Shebang detection for #!/usr/bin/osascript

Quick reference

Editor surface

Grammar coverage

Provided by tree-sitter-applescript, pinned by commit in extension.toml.

Real-world corpus

The grammar is exercised against 36 real AppleScript files drawn from Apple's /Library/Scripts/, decompiled folder-action and printing scripts, plus hand-crafted ASObjC and edge-case samples.

Current state: 36/36 active corpus files parse with zero ERROR and zero MISSING nodes. Total reduction from baseline: 732 → 0. The known-limits/ quarantine directory is empty.

A categorized history of which parser changes unblocked which files lives in CHANGELOG.md.

Example

use AppleScript version "2.4"
use scripting additions

property greeting : "Hello"

on greet(name)
    return greeting & ", " & name & "!"
end greet

on main()
    tell application "System Events"
        display dialog greet("World")
    end tell
end main

main()

More samples in example/ — including a markdown injection smoke-test (example/injection.md) and a construct showcase (example/showcase.applescript).

Dev workflow

The extension is declarative — no Rust or WASM — so the dev loop is fast.

just init       # one-time: pull the grammar submodule
just install    # symlink this dir into Zed's extensions/installed/
just dev        # verify queries, then open Zed in the example/ folder
just verify     # check every .scm node reference resolves against the grammar
just test       # run the grammar's 94-fixture test suite
just release X.Y.Z   # bump version, fast-forward grammar, verify, commit, tag
just push       # push main + tags

After just install, every change to a .scm file is picked up by Zed on the next file reload (or via cmd-shift-P → zed: rebuild dev extension). Grammar changes need a just update-grammar to advance the pin in extension.toml.

For a fresh contributor who'd rather have Zed compile the extension via its own builder (instead of the symlink trick), use just install-via-ui for instructions.

Documentation

• CHANGELOG.md — version history and per-release notes.
• docs/references/ — cached upstream documentation (Apple's AppleScript Language Guide, tree-sitter authoring docs, Zed extension docs, external-scanner reference). Useful when extending the grammar.

Contributing

• CLAUDE.md — repo-internal contract for AI coding agents (and any human who wants the same context). Covers the release process, what just update-grammar actually does, and the grammar ↔ extension coupling. AGENTS.md is a symlink to this file so Codex picks it up too.
• The just recipes — run just --list for the full set, or just status for a quick health snapshot (current version, grammar pin, submodule sync state).