Re: IDE

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 10/19/2015 02:51 PM, Eric Ludlam wrote:

> There are many reasons why having all the tags in the current buffer is
> useful.  The simplest of which are things like imenu - the menu part,
> speedbar, or ECB listings of all tags so you can jump to them.  There is
> a command for jumping to a tag in a buffer by name with completion.
> There's an isearch flavor that searched only tag names in the current
> buffer.

All right. But I would say that IMenu was conceived as a poor cousin to 
tagging. After all, if we have up-to-date information about tags in the 
current project, we can jump anywhere, not just in the current file.

My point is, we could have a more limited "protocol" to be used when we 
don't have a list of tags for the current file (and "jump to xxx" 
command is implemented via overrides, using an external tool). And a 
"full" protocol for when the tags are available.

> Using imports and includes, the semantic framework tracks what the
> dependencies are, and will reparse files that change outside of Emacs.
> It also will only open files listed as dependencies.

Right. It's quite nifty. I was just pointing out that it won't work for 
some languages.

> If it can produce the needed data, then it would be simple enough to
> swap it in as an external parser.  Since Emacs has full control over
> etags, it could be adapted to handle regions, and thus fit in just fine.

I suppose so. ctags (not in the Emacs repo) supports more file formats, 
though.

> You are right, I missed that.  I've started a new test suite around this
> missing feature and will look into it.

Thank you.

> I've run out of steam trying to design the perfect set of keybindings.
> Everyone seems to like something different.  ;)

I understand the difficulty, but surely you'd want to advertise 
semantic-ia-fast-jump? It's more precise, and thus, more powerful.

> But also, I was looking for ways to allow selection of different methods
> of the same name that was easy and quick, and this is what I came up with.

We could use some mix of the current xref behavior, with this one, for 
xref-find-definitions. xref is static, but shows everything. This one is 
dynamic, but shows only one option at a time.