I moved to tree-sitter inside Emacs a while ago and I'd say tree-sitter is much easier than it looks like.

I had a first little use case... For whatever reason the options to align let bindings in Clojure code, no matter if I tried the "semantic" or Tonsky's semi-standard way of formatting Clojure code (several tools adopted Tonsky's suggestion) and no matter which option/knob I turned on, I couldn't align like I wanted.

I really, really, really hate the pure horrible chaos of this:

    (let [abc (+ a 2)
          d (inc b)
          vwxyz (+ abc d)]
      ...

But I love the perfection of this [1]:

    (let [abc     (+ a 2)
          d       (inc b)
          vwxyz   (+ abc d)]
      ...

And the cljfmt is pretty agnostic about it: I can both use cljfmt from Emacs and have a hook forcing cljfmt and it'll align everything but it won't mess with those nice vertical alignments.

Now, I know, I know: it is supposed to work directly from cljfmt but many options are, still in the latest version, labelled as experimental and I simply couldn't make it work on my setup, no matter which knob I turned on.

So what did I do? Claude Code CLI, tree-sitter, and three elisp functions.

And I added my own vertical indenting to Clojure let bindings. And it's compatible with cljfmt (as in: if I run cljfmt it doesn't remove my vertical alignments).

I'd say the tree-sitter syntax tree is incredibly verbose (and has to be) but it's not that hard to use tree-sitter.

P.S: and I'm not alone in liking this kind of alignment and, no, we're not receptive to the "but then you modify one line and several lines are detected as modified". And we're less receptive by the day now that we begin to had tools like diff'ing tools that are indentation-agnostic and only do AST diffs.

A Better R Programming Experience Thanks to Tree-sitter