I've been trying out vim with exuberant tags and cscope but when listing the usages of a variable it also lists variables with the same name that aren't really the symbol I'm looking at. For example if I want to jump to the declaration or other usages of a variable called "temp", it will give me all variables called "temp" in the whole repo. Am I using tags and cscope wrong or is there another plugin I should be using instead?
Ctags and cscope use parsers and even regular expressions to find symbols in files. They "understand" syntax, in a way, but they don't understand code so they have no idea about what specific function is called where.
Consequently…
that relationship is not encoded in the resulting database,
and it is lost to any program using ctags or cscope.
If you want a tool that knows exactly which temp is referenced, then you don't want csope or ctags. You want something based on a compiler, like clang.
Related
How do I jump to the declaration of a C++ method instead of the definition using :tag or C-]? I tried
ctags * --C++-kinds=+p
to generate the tags file but :tselect still does not list any declarations, only definitions. The header files are hpp files and source files are cpp files, all in the same directory.
I have seen this answer but it does not answer my question, except for a comment from where I got the above idea (--<LANG>-kinds).
I'm using the following options: --c++-kinds=+pf --fields=+imaSft --extras=+q. Among many other things, I see function definitions and function declarations.
I handle everything automatically in a plugin I've been maintaining for quite some time.
On the same subject, see also:
Jump to function definition in vim
Vim Plugin to Resolve a Member Function More Efficiently Using Ctags
BTW, I highly recommend using universal-ctags (the maintained fork) instead of exhuberant ctags (the venerable and unmaintained project) when trying to generate tags for C++.
I am using Vim editor v7.4 .
I have a huge C Code library , and i make constant changes to it.
Is there a way ( before compilation) to know if a function i am adding to some file is defined for this file.
Thanks
I'm not sure to correctly understand your need. In my definition, when I add a function to a file, I add its definition, so it's defined. But when I'm using a function in a file, I only need its declaration. Then there is also the problem of being sure that a function defined in a translation unit is declared somewhere (privately in the same TU as a static function, or in a header file).
For the latter, I have a solution (that checks functions definitions and declarations are balanced in lh-cpp). For the case of being sure a function is declared in the UT it's used, it won't be that simple: we need to do the preprocessor work (and recursively follow includes) and search whether a function is indeed declared. It's not impossible, but it's best to have vim know the paths where header files are in order to look for them.
Look at a tool like exuberant ctags. It parses C-style files to find any identifier and store them in a tag file, so that each of them can be accessed quickly, inside Vim for example.
Once installed, in the shell command line, you have to create a tag file with this kind of command:
$ ctags *.c *.h
This will create an new file called tags, where all the c files and header files in the current directory are parsed. Please note that there are many options for this tool (like recursively include all lib headers, which can lead to a huge file, though), you may look at the doc for more details.
Once done, in Vim, there are several commands to use transparently the infos in this file. First check your current directory is the same as the tag file; then, to check if an identifier (like a function name) is already present in the tag file, you can use:
:ts myFunctionName
I don't think tag is a good enough solution to check whether function is defined. The flexibility of C syntax make it worse, because most tag tool is syntax-based other than semantics-based.
For example, at present, the most powerful code-completion plug-in for vim is
YouCompleteMe, which is semantic-based by virtue of Clang.
So IMHO, the answer to your question is: compile it!
In order to do compiling more convenience, you can add the following configuration in your .vimrc.
map <F6> :make install<CR>
After this, when you press F6, compiler will be launched to check your code.
In vim, how to I find all occurrences of a variable in files under a certain directory?
I know vimgrep works sometimes, but it looks for text only and doesn't work if other classes have variables of the same name and I only want the variable under a specific class.
What should I do? Or should I get an IDE instead?
Why would you want to use another IDE when you already have one? Vim is an IDE that is configurable and usable for different languages..
You could use cscope to build a database of your code. This database
Allows searching code for:
all references to a symbol
global definitions
functions called by a function
functions calling a function
text string
regular expression pattern
a file
files including a file
Further features of Cscope:
Curses based (text screen)
An information database is generated for faster searches and later reference
The fuzzy parser supports C, but is flexible enough to be useful for C++ and Java, and for use as a generalized 'grep database' (use it to browse large text documents!)
Has a command line mode for inclusion in scripts or as a backend to a GUI/frontend
Runs on all flavors of Unix, plus most monopoly-controlled operating systems.
Once your database is created, you could browse through the usages of your variables, functions, etc.
Edit (slightly off-topic):
another cool thing that's quite handy when working with Vim on code is the taglist plugin that uses Ctags:
The "Tag List" plugin is a source code browser plugin for Vim and
provides an overview of the structure of source code files and allows
you to efficiently browse through source code files for different
programming languages.
cscope step by step example
Go to the base directory of your project, and run:
cscope -Rb
This generates a cscope.out file which contains the parsed information. Generation is reasonably fast, even for huge projects like the Linux kernel.
Note that cscope is not designed to work with other languages other than C. Sometimes it does work for other C-like syntax languages like Python, and you can force it to recognize those files with hacks such as cscope -Rb -s * and others mentioned at: Using cscope to browse Python code with VIM? but it won't work as well as for C.
Open vim, and run:
:cs add cscope.out
:cs find s my_func
s is a mnemonic for symbol. The other cscope provided queries are also possible.
The cscope interface (ouside Vim) also has a variable assignment query (subset of symbol occurrences) which Vim does not seem to offer (?)
This adds a list of the callers to the quickfix list, which you can open with:
:copen
Go to the line that interests you and hit enter to jump there.
See also:
automatically add the nearest database (parent directories) when you enter a file: how to auto load cscope.out in vim
for function calls: How to find the callers and callee of a function in C code in vi/vim?
I am using ":ta " to jump to a method.
For example i got two classes named A.java and B.java. They both have a foo() method and B.java have another method called fooBar(). Then i open A.java and input :ta foo then press TAB then i will got two completion : foo and fooBar. But what i want to jump now is just tag in current file, i don't like tag in other file to display.
And i found tagslist does very good in this job. So if i can use the tag generated by taglist to search from, it will be very nice.
Depending on how many times you call your methods a couple of * may be enough.
Without using tags, gd can be used to go to the local declaration of the method under your cursor. I tend to choose the most low-tech solution usually, so I would go with this one.
But ctags is also able to generate tags for a single file only or for an arbitrary selection of files. It can be done in a few steps but it's definetely not as straightforward as what you are accustomed to do…
Create a file with the name(s) of the file(s) you want to scan. Let's say it's called files.txt and it's located at the root of your working directory.
Generate your tags file using the -L <file> argument: ctags -L files.txt.
At this point you should have a tags file containing only the tags present in the file(s) specified at step 1.
Generating different tags files for the whole project and for single files may be useful, here. A short script generating a tags file named after the current file and making it the sole tags source may make the whole thing easier.
EDIT
Actually, TagList and TagBar don't generate tags files. The output of the ctags <options> command they run is used internally and parsed with all kinds of regexp to filter by scope or filename or whatever.
Unfortunately this cannot be done using ctags. Ctags does not respect context, it is a pure list of all possible "functions". Try to open a tag file with an editor (e.g. vim) and you will see it is just a list of "functions" (in case of Java they are "methods"). Example:
getDesc src/com/redhat/rhn/internal/doclet/Handler.java /^ public String getDesc() {$/;" m class:Handler
getDoc src/com/redhat/rhn/internal/doclet/ApiCall.java /^ public String getDoc() {$/;" m class:ApiCall
Vim just search the file "as is" without giving it any context - it just search for a "function". It is able to search for files, classes, methods, enums etc. Tags format is described in more detail here: http://ctags.sourceforge.net/FORMAT
In Vim you have few possibilities. There are several plugins that gives Vim some context sensitivity, but you cannot use tags for that. Vim itself has a feature called OmniComplete and there are few plugins dedicated for Java. Then you can use Ctrl-X Ctrl-O to start a completition. I recommend you to map this to a different key (maybe Ctrl-Space if you like). More info about Java OmniComplete plugins here:
Vim omnicompletion for Java
Eclim (http://eclim.org/) is very comperhensive, but difficult to setup (you need to run Eclipse in the background). JDE script is easier and also robust (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1213). And please note IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition (free) also has a very nice Vim plugin that is free to use. But I understand you - Vim is Vim.
Good luck!
Not exactly an answer to your question, but it seems like there's no way to do exactly what you need, so, i would recommend you the following: for your Java development in Vim, try eclim.
This tool helps you to use your favorite text editor Vim with power of an Eclipse (IDE).
I can't find analogue for tab-completion of :ta, but i know a smart analogue for g] : this is a command :JavaSearchContext. You can map it to something.
For example, if you have two classes A and B, and you have method foo() in each class, then g] will ask you every time you want to jump to foo(), but :JavaSearchContext will always jump to the proper declaration of foo().
Of course, there are many other features.
So here's my problem. I've gotten exuberant ctags working with Vim, and it works great, most of the time. One thing that still irks me though is whenever I try to search for a function that is named the same as some variable name. I sometimes get the right tag on the first try, sometimes not. Then after I pull up the list of alternate tags with :tselect, it comes up with a list of tags for both function definitions or variable definitions/assignments. (I'm in PHP so definitions and assignments are syntactically indistinguishable).
However, I notice that there's a column labeled 'kind' that has a value of 'f' or 'v', for function and variable, respectively. I can't seem to find a whole lot of information about this field, it seems like it may not be exactly standardized or widely used. My question is: can you filter tag results in Vim by "kind"?
Ideally, the default would be to search the whole tags file, but by specifying some extra flag, you could search a specific ('f' or 'v') kind only.
This is such a small problem for me as it doesn't come up THAT often, but sometimes it's the small problems that really annoy you.
You can certainly generate ctag files with any combination of php-kinds that you want (see the ouput of the command ctags --list-kinds.)
If you feel it's worth the effort you can make a vim function tagkind and bind it to a command. The tagkind function can overwrite the current tags vim variable to point at only the tag file with the kinds that you are interested in and call :tag. Optionally, it can store the previous version of the tags variable and restore it after this one call.
Unfortunately, I don't know of anyway other than this. Perhaps someone else would know.
I generate python ctags with --python-kinds=-i to exclude tags for import statements (which are useless). Maybe you could generate with --php-kinds=-v and drop a class of tags completely.
You can read :help tag-priority. Apparently the "highest-priority" tag is chosen based on some hard-coded logic.
fzf with fzf.vim has a :Tags (for the whole project) and :BTags for the current file option that generates ctags on the fly.
An issue raised on the plugin 'Skip tag kinds in :BTags and :Tags' gives the following code that you can use to only generated tags for a particular kind. I've modified the below so that it should only search for the PHP f kind.
command! BTagsEnhanced
\ call fzf#vim#buffer_tags(<q-args>, [
\ printf('ctags -f - --sort=no --php-kinds=f --excmd=number --language-force=%s %s', &filetype, expand('%:S'))], {})
Note as per my comment on the question, there is a potential Vim tagfinder.vim plugin via a blog post on Vim and Ctags: Finding Tag Definitions. But I haven't tried it.