Re: xref rocks!

[Dmitry Gutov]

Hey Nicolas,

On 04/25/2016 02:35 PM, Nicolas Petton wrote:

> I just want to say that xref is IMO a big step forward, it really rocks!
>
> Its UI is pleasant to use and it's very easily extensible (I added a
> backend with just a few methods).

I'm glad you like it, but please note that the API is not yet stable. So 
you may have to bump the xref-js2 dependency to emacs-26 sometime during 
it development cycle.

> If all ref tools could move to using xref in the future, we'd have a
> very consistent UI for jumping around!

That would be nice, but it has a bunch of missing spots.

Off the top of my head:

- You can't repeat searches with `g'.
- The n/p commands end up changing the window configuration with no 
reliable way to undo those changes, aside from Winner (and even it won't 
help undo some changes). Not sure what to do about it.
- The situation with "rename refactoring" is a bit uncertain. Right now 
we have xref-quory-replace-in-results, which uses query-replace. I'm not 
sure it's beneficial to keep using it (or even something similar) in the 
long run, and I'm not even sure that a list of xrefs is a good data 
format to base refactorings on. Either we'll have to extend it to more 
"abstract" xrefs (like ones corresponding to files, for renames), or 
introduce a separate data format, and a separate API to feed to the 
refactoring UI.

So I want to see the potential authors evaluate xref and file all kinds 
of feature requests and bug requests, so that we end up stabilizing the 
best possible API we can.