That would waste CPU time and introduce additional delays when opening files.

They could probably lazily install the grammars like neovim does, but as someone who doesn't have much faith in the reliability of internet infrastructure, I'll personally take it...

Just ran `:TSInstall all` in neovim out of curiosity, and the results were predictable:

  ~/.local/share/nvim/lazy/nvim-treesitter/parser
  files 309
  size 232M

  /usr/lib/helix/runtime/grammars
  files 246
  size 185M

If disk space is important for your use case, I guess filesystem compression would save far more than just compressing binaries with upx. btrfs+zstd handle those .so well:

  $ compsize ~/.local/share/nvim/lazy/nvim-treesitter/parser
  Type       Perc     Disk Usage   Uncompressed Referenced
  TOTAL       11%       26M         231M         231M

  $ compsize /usr/lib/helix/runtime/grammars
  Type       Perc     Disk Usage   Uncompressed Referenced
  TOTAL       12%       23M         184M         184M

I mean, they could decompress it once when using a language for the first time. It will still be fully offline, but with a bit uncompressing.

If this is a concern, why not compress at the filesystem level?