How do i reload the tags file from within Vim?
Is a restart necessary?
According to :help tag-binary-search, the tags file is binary (or linear) searched on each lookup, so there's no need to reload the file:
*tag-binary-search*
Vim uses binary searching in the tags file to find the desired tag quickly
(when enabled at compile time |+tag_binary|). But this only works if the
tags file was sorted on ASCII byte value. Therefore, if no match was found,
another try is done with a linear search. If you only want the linear search,
reset the 'tagbsearch' option. Or better: Sort the tags file!
Note that the binary searching is disabled when not looking for a tag with a
specific name. This happens when ignoring case and when a regular expression
is used that doesn't start with a fixed string. Tag searching can be a lot
slower then. The former can be avoided by case-fold sorting the tags file.
See 'tagbsearch' for details.
As far as I know it is not necessary Vim 7.3 use the tags file as soon as it has been generated.
I find it helps to just load the tags file in another buffer/tab. Then I can re-load that buffer with :e! to get vim to see my tag updates.
Related
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
There is a lot of documentation about vim's quickfix but I would like to know:
How I can I use a text file (or copy+paste from a terminal), and put this into a quick-fix list in vim?
All the docs I found so far assume that you run make or vimgrep, but in this case I just want to use a text file created elsewhere.
You're looking for :cfile / :cgetfile:
:cf[ile][!] [errorfile] Read the error file and jump to the first error.
The file you're reading naturally must be in a format that can be parsed by the 'errorformat' option.
One way to do it is to change makeprog to cat from your text file, pretty sure there's a better way to do it though.
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.
Is there a way to tell Vim not to highlight a word once? For example, in "the password is abc123", I don't want to add abc123 to the wordlist, but still wouldn't like the big red rectangle around it.
Clarification: I'm looking for a command that makes the spell checker ignore the current word (or last misspelling).
Without having the word stored somewhere, it's hard (not to say impossible) to ignore it always.
But, if you are looking to ignore the word really once, that is only for a moment, you can add it to the internal list with the zG command.
*zG*
zG Like "zg" but add the word to the internal word list
|internal-wordlist|.
*internal-wordlist*
The internal word list is used for all buffers where 'spell' is set. It is
not stored, it is lost when you exit Vim. It is also cleared when 'encoding'
is set.
When your cursor is positioned on a word that is highlighted as misspelled you can add it to your wordlist by pressing zg. Vim allows you to load more than one wordlist at a time, which makes it possible to have (for example) a global wordlist, and a project specific wordlist.
By default, when you run zg it will add the current word to the first spellfile it finds in your runtime path for the current encoding. In my case, that turns out to be ~/.vim/spell/en.utf-8.add when I'm working with UTF-8 encoding. Try running the following commands:
:setlocal spellfile+=~/.vim/spell/en.utf-8.add
:setlocal spellfile+=oneoff.utf-8.add
That will set you up so that zg (or 1zg) adds the current word to your default spellfile. But running 2zg would add the current word to a file called oneoff.utf-8.add, in the same directory as the file that you are working on. If the file doesn't exist, Vim will try to create it for you.
When you open the file again in the future, you will have to run the same two commands to make Vim check the oneoff.utf-8.add spellfile. Unfortunately, Vim does not allow you to set the spellfile option in a modeline, so if you want to run these commands automatically when the file opens, you would have to find some other way. This question includes a few ideas on how you might proceed.