Tools

STXT needs no installation to get started. Depending on the intended use:

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 while editing, grammar-driven autocompletion and hover with the definition of each node.

• No installation and no account; the work is kept in the browser itself.
• It includes a seed of example documents.
• A document can be shared with a link that carries the content inside.

It allows following the tutorial without leaving the browser.

VS Code extension

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

code --install-extension stxt-lang.stxt

Features:

• 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

Without a permanent installation, through npx:

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 document errors (1) from command misuse (2), so it can be used directly from a script. No command rewrites files without --write. Every option, output and exit code is in the command-line reference.

Libraries

This portal maintains three official implementations —TypeScript/JavaScript, Java and Python—, and we hope many more will appear for other languages.

TypeScript / JavaScript

@stxt-lang/core on npm. It is the parser the extension, the command line and the playground run on. The full guide —tree, validation, resolution, canonical JSON, writing— is in the TypeScript library.

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. The full guide is in the Java library.

<dependency>
    <groupId>dev.stxt</groupId>
    <artifactId>stxt-core</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.0</version>
</dependency>

Or with Gradle:

implementation 'dev.stxt:stxt-core:1.0.0'

Python

stxt on PyPI. Pure Python, 3.10 or newer. The full guide is in the Python library.

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:

Questions, ideas and anything about the language itself go to the discussions of the organization; bugs, to the issues of the repository of the tool concerned.