Re: Bad moves with xref-find-definitions

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 04/26/2015 02:31 PM, Vitalie Spinu wrote:

> What do you currently do if there are multiple matching definitions of
> the "thing-at-point"? Prompt?

Show them all in the xref buffer. But if the backend is smart enough, it 
will include the disambiguating context information as text properties 
on the "thing-at-point" string.

That kind of string (probably) can't be present in the completion table, 
though.

> All I was trying to say is that tags are commonly useful alongside
> dynamic backends. Blindly replacing tags with an even very good backend
> is not the right direction IMW. Expecting from end users to solve this
> problem with add-function :before is unacceptable if there are way to
> fix it at Emacs level.

It doesn't have to come down to users. Completion packages could take 
care of it as well.

> As to prompting, if you try to accommodate multiple backends, then
> merging completion candidates from multiple backends is a simple task
> when you prompt.

Not if you want to avoid duplicates. Currently, file opening and 
nagivation to the exact positions is being done lazily (which improves 
overall performance quite a bit). So you can simply call `delete-dups' 
on the xref elements when they come from different backends.

> If you try instead to "bypass the minibuffer" it's
> likely to be a much more difficult task.

How does it make any difference?