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?
Related
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.
I am currently maintaining a project which is a large multi-language project including python, perl, bash and c/c++ languages. My current IDE is vim with YouCompleteMe plugin.
The problem of using this is that ycm more or less supports only one language for a project. Therefore, sometime when I encountered a c command called in a bash file, it took me a while to search what is the source code of such command, which I could not use goto functionality based on ycm.
I therefore wonder if there is a way to support such "cross-reference intellisense", e.g., I could goto a c or python command in a bash file ?
It is not very intelligent, but a tool like Universal Ctags, that supports dozens and dozens of languages, can be used to index your whole project and Vim's built-in tag-related commands can be used to jump to the definition of anything in any filetype as long as there is a tag for it.
See :help tags.
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.
Two part question:
First, when using VIM what process do I take and what keys do I type to "go to definition" or "go to declaration" etc.? This document might be the answer to my question, but I can't get it to work, so I'm unsure. It looks like its merely text matching the string rather than finding the true definition. If I can get this to work, then will I be able to jump outside of the current document to a definition/declaration? Or does this only work within a single document?
Second, how do I make this work specifically with the Go programming language? It sure would be nice to "click" the Client in
clnt := &http.Client{Transport: tr}
And be taken to the actual code that defines an http.Client.
Possible? How?
As you guess, gd (and other commands) is merely text matching, vim doesn't understand the syntax as it is just a text editor, :h gd will explain how gd works.
Usually, 'go to definition' is brought by using CTRL-] and tag files. A user manual about this topic can be read by :h 29.1.
First you need to generate a tags file for your project, as latest Exuberant Ctags has supported golang (from here), command
cd /path/to/your/project
ctags -f tags -R --fields=+K+a
will do the job.
Second, open vim, by default vim will find tag files under working directory (according to 'tags' option), if the tag file is found successfully, then CTRL-]` should works well.
Also check two useful plugins Tagbar and Easytags.
For golang, you can use the application godef to do it. The pluging vim-go helps you on setting everything, so, you just type 'gd' in a definition and it goes to the exact definition.
https://github.com/fatih/vim-go/blob/master/doc/vim-go.txt
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.