Re: [PATCH 3/3] completion: match ctags symbol names in grep patterns

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Oct 18, 2011, 15:04 UTC
Message-ID: <20111018150423.GA11593@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vd3duixdg.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 12:15:23AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> > It's debatable whether this belongs in the generic completion code, as
> > it really only works if your project uses ctags. But I find it to be a
> > huge timesaver for finding callsites of functions, especially when
> > coupled with "git jump grep" from the previous patch.
> 
> Could you elaborate a bit more on how this would help for finding
> callsites? You are looking at a function and do not want to break its
> callers, so at that point presumably you already know the name of the
> function, no?
> 
> Ahh, Ok, you do not necessarily want to type the long function name.

Exactly. Actually, it is often not so much "do not want to type" as "cannot remember the exact name", but the effect is the same. :)

I use the same completion for "vim -t" which will jump to the definition.

Show 7 quoted lines

> By the way, I notice that "make tags" runs "find ." looking for any files
> and directories that match "*.[hcS]" (so do $(ETAGS_TARGET) and cscope),
> without even excluding .git metadirectory.
> 
> Perhaps something like this is in order?
> [...]
> +FIND_SOURCE_FILES = git ls-files '*.[hcS]'

Makes sense to me. I doubt it matters much in practice, though, as we don't tend to have random untracked source files lying around.

My version of ctags will actually do the recursion itself with "ctags -R", picking out any files with with languages it knows about. But maybe not all versions do that.

Also, I have often found myself trying to do completion on shell functions. I wonder if it's worth adding them to the list (again, my version of ctags understands bourne shell just fine, but I don't know if all do).

-Peff