Tools

STXT needs no installation to get started. Depending on what you want to do:

Playground

play.stxt.dev is an editor in the browser, designed as a simplified VS Code: several documents at once, their schemas or templates next to them, syntax and validation errors as you type, grammar-driven autocompletion and hover with the definition of each node.

• Nothing to install and no account to create; your work is kept in the browser itself.
• It comes seeded with example documents to play with and break.
• A document can be shared with a link that carries the content inside.

It is the place to follow the tutorial without leaving the browser.

VS Code extension

The official extension is STXT – Semantic Text (stxt-lang.stxt). From the extensions view, searching for stxt, or from the terminal:

code --install-extension stxt-lang.stxt

What it brings:

• Syntax errors in real time, and schema errors when a grammar applies.
• Semantic highlighting driven by the parser itself.
• Completion with the nodes the schema allows and the values of an ENUM.
• Hover information: node, canonical name, type, values and description.
• Go to definition (F12): from a node to the Node: of its schema, or to its line inside the Structure of its template.
• Document formatting.
• Schema and template resolution from the .stxt/ directories of the project, the user and the system, as described in the discovery reference.

Command line

The stxt command is the interface for scripts, Makefiles and continuous integration pipelines. It is published on npm as @stxt-lang/cli and requires Node 20 or newer.

npm install -g @stxt-lang/cli
stxt --version

Or without installing anything permanently:

npx @stxt-lang/cli validate docs/

The commands:

A CI example, which fails if any document does not validate or is not well formatted:

stxt validate --recursive docs/
stxt format --check --recursive docs/

The exit code distinguishes your documents have errors from the command was misused, so it can be used directly from a script. No command rewrites files without --write.

Libraries

Three implementations, one per ecosystem, with the same scope and the same version. All three derive from the specification through one shared reference pseudocode, and all three pass the same conformance corpus. None of them has runtime dependencies.

TypeScript / JavaScript

@stxt-lang/core on npm. It is the parser the extension, the command line and the playground run on.

npm install @stxt-lang/core

A minimal example:

import { Parser, InlineNode } from '@stxt-lang/core';

const result = new Parser().parseResult(text);
for (const error of result.getErrors()) {
	console.error(`line ${error.line} [${error.code}]: ${error.message}`);
}
const root = result.getNodes()[0];
if (root instanceof InlineNode) {
	console.log(root.getChild('Title')?.getText());
}

Java

dev.stxt:stxt-core on Maven Central. Java 17 or newer; automatic module dev.stxt.

<dependency>
    <groupId>dev.stxt</groupId>
    <artifactId>stxt-core</artifactId>
    <version>0.7.0</version>
</dependency>

Or with Gradle:

implementation 'dev.stxt:stxt-core:0.7.0'

Python

stxt on PyPI. Pure Python, 3.10 or newer.

pip install stxt

A minimal example:

from stxt import Parser, InlineNode

result = Parser().parse_result(text)
for error in result.get_errors():
    print(f"line {error.line} [{error.code}]: {error.message}")
root = result.get_nodes()[0]
if isinstance(root, InlineNode):
    print(root.get_child("Title").get_text())

Source code

The whole ecosystem lives in the stxt-lang organization on GitHub, under the MIT license:

Issues and proposals go to the repository of the tool concerned; those about the language itself, to stxt-web.