Re: More precise tag following

On Sat, Jan 27, 2007 at 06:52:38PM -0500, Jeff King wrote:

For emacs users, it would even be better to tie it into emacs. That way you're already at the line number looking at the source code when you start wondering, "who the f*ck created this mess?". The way I'd design it would to have emacs split the window vertically, and place the blame information in a buffer whose scrolling was synchronized with the main window.

One of the things that I noticed myself doing (and I'm guessing many other people would do it as well), is that you have a tendency to wait until the attribution information has started filling in before you start scrolling to the part of the code you were interested in --- and since the beginning of the fle often hasn't changed much until the earliest beginnings of the project, that can be quite a while. And of course, scrolling to the right part of the file is a pain. So building it into the editor is not only convenient, but it avoids the psychological effects that could make it seem slow because how long it takes to fill the attribution for these first bits:

/*
 * Copyright (C) 1991, 1992 Linus Torvalds
 * Copyright (C) 1994,      Karl Keyte: Added support for disk statistics
 * Elevator latency, (C) 2000  Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de> SuSE
 * Queue request tables / lock, selectable elevator, Jens Axboe <axboe@suse.de>
 * kernel-doc documentation started by NeilBrown <neilb@cse.unsw.edu.au> -  July2000
 * bio rewrite, highmem i/o, etc, Jens Axboe <axboe@suse.de> - may 2001
 */

Anyway, this should be relatively easily for emacs, and for eclipse (although I don't think anyone is using eclipse to do Kernel hacking, is there?). I have no idea how you would hack this into Vim, other than passing the line number into the GUI so it can open right into the function that the developer was looking at.

						- Ted