Re: Generalizing find-definition

[Helmut Eller]

On Sun, Nov 02 2014, Stefan Monnier wrote:

>> In my experience, tags-loop-continue is rather hard to use and I have
>> long argued to get rid of it and replace it with a better UI.
>> E.g. tags-loop-continue must be pressed multiple times just to find out
>> at the end that none of the offered candidates was relevant.  SLIME does
>> it differently: the list of all candidates is displayed in a separate
>> buffer with one candidate per line; a bit like the results of a search
>> engine like Google.  The user must then move the cursor to the
>> interesting line and press RET to actually jump to the definition.  If
>> there's only a single candidate, then there's no need to display the
>> list and we can jump to the candidate right away.  SLIME has no analog
>> to tags-loop-continue (and no key binding for it) because it's not
>> needed; at least nobody ever asked for such a command.
>
> I agree that tags-loop-continue is not super convenient.
> What key-binding does SLIME use to get this list buffer (which would
> most naturally be implemented as a kind of grep/compilation-mode buffer)?
> Would C-u M-. be usable for that?

M-. brings up the list (if there are multiple candidates; if there's a
single candidate then no list is displayed).  We use C-u M-. to read the
symbol from the minibuffer (as opposed to parsing it from context around
point).

We also have a group of bindings for similar but not so important
commands:

 C-c C-w c  -- who calls (lists callers)
 C-c C-w w  -- calls who (lists functions called by the current function)
 C-c C-w r  -- who references (for global variables)
 C-c C-w s  -- who sets (for global variables)
 C-c C-w b  -- who binds (for dynamic variables)
 C-c C-w s  -- who specializes (lists methods specialized for a specific class)
 C-c <      -- list callers
 C-c >      -- list callees

The C-c < and C-c C-w c do conceptually the same but one is implemented
with an index (like tags) and the other by scanning and inspecting
function objects on the heap.  Different commands for historical
reasons.

Helmut