Fennel wiki: Home

Welcome to the Fennel wiki!

Lists of:

• Codebases written in Fennel
• Cookbook of Fennel programming techniques
• Editor support for Fennel
• Package managers that include Fennel
• Writing about Fennel

There are many different ways to distribute Fennel code depending on the context.

Lua Runtimes

Fennel is officially supported on:

• PUC Lua versions 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, and 5.4
• LuaJIT

Fennel works but isn't officially supported on these Lua implementations:

• Fengari (Javascript runtime)
• RaptorJIT (LuaJIT fork)
• Cobalt (Java virtual machine)
• gopher-lua (Golang)

You can also use it with these bindings to PUC:

• NLua (.NET)
• Sweet Moon (Ruby, also supports LuaJIT)
• HsLua (Haskell)

Fennel does not work on these due to bugs in the Lua implementations:

• luerl (Erlang runtime)
• luaj (Java virtual machine)
• rembulan (Java virtual machine)
• moonsharp (.NET runtime)
• guile-lua-rebirth (Guile)

This only means that they cannot run the Fennel compiler. Code written in Fennel and then AOT-compiled to Lua will usually work fine.

Tools

These tools support Fennel right out of the box:

• cloc (count lines of code)
• Jeejah An nREPL server for Fennel and Lua
• pygments (syntax highlighting)
• chroma (syntax highlighting)
• TIC-80 (fantasy retro game console)
• fnlfmt (formatter)
• fenneldoc Documentation validation and generation tool
• Linguist syntax highlighting and language breakdown graphs library, used by Github
• tree-sitter-fennel Fennel grammar for Tree-sitter, which in turns allows editors that use it (Neovim for example) to have syntax highlighting for Fennel
• fennel-ls A language server for intelligent editing of the Fennel Programming Language
• fennel-language-server Fennel language server protocol (LSP) support, written in Rust.
• scintilla is a text editor component that contains an LPeg grammar for Fennel

These tools support Fennel with some manual tweaks:

• bat A cat(1) clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration.

Scripting via embedded Fennel

Use Fennel instead of Lua to configure/script your software:

• awesome-wm (How to use Fennel to configure the window manager awesome)
• OpenResty REST API (Example project for building a JSON REST API with Fennel on OpenResty)
• Neovim (It can be configured in Lua and thanks to Hotpot you can use Fennel wherever Lua is supported (which is pretty much everywhere: plugins, colors, syntax, etc.))
• Spacehammer (keyboard-driven workflows for Mac OS)

Support / more resources

• On Lua:
  • Lua mailing list - for questions about the Lua language itself or specific Lua modules (most module authors hang out there!)
  • Lua documentation - documentation on the Lua language, including the reference manual
  • Lua forum - a beginner friendly Lua community
• There are lots of recordings of great talks from FennelConf on a variety of different Fennel topics.