Common Pitfalls

If you are having issues getting indent-bars working, you may have encountered one of the issues described below.

Treesitter Issues

If you have (setq indent-bars-treesit-support t), there are additional steps you need to take to get treesitter working with indent-bars. This option enables integration with treesitter, but unless treesitter is configured correctly, it won't provide indent-bars with any additional context.

Additionally, this article describes treesitter in detail for those who need/want to delve deep into its inner workings.

Install Language Grammar

As mentioned in the README, Treesitter requires a language grammar to be installed for each language mode. Use M-x treesit-install-language-grammar and follow the instructions to complete this step.

Many languages have a language grammar available from the community on Github. A small collection has been curated below for convenience.

• tree-sitter-c
• tree-sitter-cpp
• tree-sitter-python
• tree-sitter-elisp

Start the Parser

By default, Treesitter doesn't create parsers automatically in non-*-ts modes, even after the language grammar has been installed. When a treesitter parser is not running, setting indent-bars-treesit-support will then seem to have no effect.

This can be fixed by adding a hook for your language mode. For example:

(add-hook 'c-mode-common-hook (lambda () (treesit-parser-create 'c)))

Bars Not Aligned With Indentation

Make sure that any mode-specific indentation configuration is initialized before calling (indent-bars-mode). If you configure indent widths in a mode hook, those configurations may take effect after indent-bars is started. When this happens, indent-bars may use the language mode's default indentation values. One way to ensure this is to use a large depth in the call to add-hook. Another is to configure indentation for a mode in the :custom section of a use-package stanza.