GNU Emacs 23.1.1
I am maintaining someones code. There are many files and directories for the headers and source files.
I am wondering if there is a easy way to use emacs that when I highlight a variable name I can go straight to where it is declared?
Some of the structures I am working in are declared in other header files, rather than go searching for them, I just want to be taken straight to them.
Many thanks for any suggestions,
Look into the etags command which builds a tags database. Once the tag DB is built and loaded, you can use M-. on any keyword to jump directly to the definition.
It's also pretty easy to hit C-h v RET on the variable name, to get its *Help*, then hit RET (or click) the file-name link to get to the source definition.
Related
I have CEDET working for the most part on emacs 24.2 with the latest from bzr
repository.
When I am searching for symbols or definitions, I see that the cedet mini-buffer
shows parses through a lot of files, some that are not there as header-files, the files
do not have any reference to the symbols I am searching.
I will leave CEDET to its job, let it search for symbols as it sees fit.
Is there any debug mechanism or verbose mode that I can turn on to see
1) What are all the files it is searching.
2) If it has found the GTAGS file at the base of my project. I understand that CEDET only
consults the GTAGS file to know about symbols.
I ask because there are some symbols that CEDET is unable to find the definition
for, but I'm able to find it from the gtags command line.
Thanks to Alex and Eric for their Numerous posts through-out the net.
This is a multi-step process.
First, make sure you've setup Global in the ways you want, such as via ede's locate feature, and through Symref.
Next, while visiting a file in a project you care about, use:
M-x cedet-gnu-global-show-root RET
to see if it can find a Global index file in that project.
Next, to see if symref found it, you need to eval this:
M-: (semantic-symref-detect-symref-tool)
and it will give you a symbol representing the tool it has chosen to use. It will say 'grep if it failed to use Global.
If you were in the middle of configuring things, you might need to reset things for you buffer. An easy way is to kill the buffer, and find it again, or:
M-x (setq semantic-symref-tool 'detect) RET
to force a detection again.
I have read Alex Ott's fantastic guide to CEDET for Emacs, and I think I know how to set up my EDE projects correctly.
However, when I try to jump to a local symbol (e.g. the main() function in C++) using the command semantic-complete-jump-local (C-c , j), I get the error [no match] even though I am calling this command from within the .cpp file where the symbol is defined.
Also, when I try to jump with semantic-complete-jump-global (C-c , J) to a symbol with multiple definitions on different files (e.g. multiple main() functions), CEDET complains with [not unique] but it does not give me a way to choose which symbol I want to see. The only way to find the symbol I am interested in is to cycle through all the options with <TAB> buffer by buffer until I find the one I am interested in. Is there a way to get a list of symbols from where I can choose ? Ideally, it would be great to get an autocomplete list similar to those that Emacs helm (formerly known as Anything) provides.
This is all with Emacs 24.2.1 on Linux with CEDET 1.1.
Had you tried to use semantic-ia-fast-jump command? It uses not only Semantic, but also other data sources, to calculate where to jump. I just tried it, and it correctly jumped to variable, that was declared in the parent class, 3 levels higher in hierarchy.
What's the best choice for defining a large table in org-mode (by large, I mean that each cell can have multiple lines)? The one feature of org-mode is its ability to export to HTML or LaTeX (or other), but in this case would I have to commit to the export format a priori and hard-code the table in that language (e.g., HTML)? What software would you use to create table with mostly text fields with paragraphs in each cell in the first place (which you could convert to HTML, for instance)?
You might want to look at table-mode. This supports the sort of "large tables" you're talking about. It's been part of the emacs distribution for some time now. Start with
(require 'table)
somewhere in ~/.emacs. Create an empty file or buffer, type
M-x table-insert RET
answer the initial questions sensibly and then play around a bit. You can get some documentation with
C-h f table-insert RET
To find more documentation, you'll need to locate the source code. Start with
M-x locate-library RET table RET
This will show you the location of the byte-compiled lisp file for table-mode, and in that same directory you should fine table.el or table.el.gz, which will contain documentation you'll need to at least skim. Most linux systems (foolishly) do not install the .el files by default, so you'll have to go rooting around with the package manager to get them.
I was fairly sure that org-mode knew how to parse table-mode tables and format them for you, but I can't seem to find that written down anywhere right now.
I am not a very good at using Emacs, but the feature I would like the most would be some integration with help/documentation for a particular language/API I use at the moment. I would imagine that there would be help displayed in another buffer depending on where I put my cursor while editing.
I wonder if there is a package that does that, even if it would be very simple, just displaying some file based on the keyword. I think there is, but I cannot find it ("help" is a too generic word).
(In particular, I would like to have this help for Common Lisp, but other languages, such as Java or C, could be useful.)
ILISP and SLIME provide several methods for looking up a function; see the Emacs wiki and the SLIME documentation. Or just built into Emacs itself, there are functions like C-h f to get function help or M-x man; both use the text at the point by default. You could pretty easily adapt them to work for another language of your choice.
Assuming you are using SLIME for common-lisp, you can take a look at slime-autodoc-mode.
Sorry, can't help with a generic solution for this.
You can set up the CLHS root for SLIME in your .emacs file:
(setq common-lisp-hyperspec-root "/usr/share/doc/hyperspec/HyperSpec/")
Adjust the path to where you put your HyperSpec.
Then, C-c C-d h with point at a symbol will look it up there in your browser.
One thing you might like to enable is eldoc-mode, by adding (turn-on-eldoc-mode) to your mode hook functions for the appropriate programming modes.
In ElDoc mode, the echo area displays information about a
function or variable in the text where point is. If point is
on a documented variable, it displays the first line of that
variable's doc string. Otherwise it displays the argument list
of the function called in the expression point is on.
This is probably less than you were after, but it still makes a good companion to a fuller-featured contextual help system, and there are a number of programming modes that support it.
I am switching to Emacs from TextMate. One feature of TextMate that I would really like to have in Emacs is the "Find in Project" search box that uses fuzzy matching. Emacs sort of has this with ido, but ido does not search recursively through child directories. It searches only within one directory.
Is there a way to give ido a root directory and to search everything under it?
Update:
The questions below pertain to find-file-in-project.el from Michał Marczyk's answer.
If anything in this message sounds obvious it's because I have used Emacs for less than one week. :-)
As I understand it, project-local-variables lets me define things in a .emacs-project file that I keep in my project root.
How do I point find-file-in-project to my project root?
I am not familiar with regex syntax in Emacs Lisp. The default value for ffip-regexp is:
".*\\.\\(rb\\|js\\|css\\|yml\\|yaml\\|rhtml\\|erb\\|html\\|el\\)"
I presume that I can just switch the extensions to the ones appropriate for my project.
Could you explain the ffip-find-options? From the file:
(defvar ffip-find-options
""
"Extra options to pass to `find' when using find-file-in-project.
Use this to exclude portions of your project: \"-not -regex \\".vendor.\\"\"")
What does this mean exactly and how do I use it to exclude files/directories?
Could you share an example .emacs-project file?
I use M-x rgrep for this. It automatically skips a lot of things you don't want, like .svn directories.
(Updated primarily in order to include actual setup instructions for use with the below mentioned find-file-in-project.el from the RINARI distribution. Original answer left intact; the new bits come after the second horizontal rule.)
Have a look at the TextMate page of the EmacsWiki. The most promising thing they mention is probably this Emacs Lisp script, which provides recursive search under a "project directory" guided by some variables. That file begins with an extensive comments section describing how to use it.
What makes it particularly promising is the following bit:
;; If `ido-mode' is enabled, the menu will use `ido-completing-read'
;; instead of `completing-read'.
Note I haven't used it myself... Though I may very well give it a try now that I've found it! :-)
HTH.
(BTW, that script is part of -- to quote the description from GitHub -- "Rinari Is Not A Rails IDE (it is an Emacs minor mode for Rails)". If you're doing any Rails development, you might want to check out the whole thing.)
Before proceeding any further, configure ido.el. Seriously, it's a must-have on its own and it will improve your experience with find-file-in-project. See this screencast by Stuart Halloway (which I've already mentioned in a comment on this answer) to learn why you need to use it. Also, Stu demonstrates how flexible ido is by emulating TextMate's project-scoped file-finding facility in his own way; if his function suits your needs, read no further.
Ok, so here's how to set up RINARI's find-file-in-project.el:
Obtain find-file-in-project.el and project-local-variables.el from the RINARI distribution and put someplace where Emacs can find them (which means in one of the directories in the load-path variable; you can use (add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/some/directory") to add new directories to it).
Add (require 'find-file-in-project) to your .emacs file. Also add the following to have the C-x C-M-f sequence bring up the find-file-in-project prompt: (global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-M-f") 'find-file-in-project).
Create a file called .emacs-project in your projects root directory. At a minimum it should contain something like this: (setl ffip-regexp ".*\\.\\(clj\\|py\\)$"). This will make it so that only files whose names and in clj or py will be searched for; please adjust the regex to match your needs. (Note that this regular expression will be passed to the Unix find utility and should use find's preferred regular expression syntax. You still have to double every backslash in regexes as is usual in Emacs; whether you also have to put backslashes before parens / pipes (|) if you want to use their 'magic' regex meaning depends on your find's expectations. The example given above works for me on an Ubuntu box. Look up additional info on regexes in case of doubt.) (Note: this paragraph has been revised in the last edit to fix some confusion w.r.t. regular expression syntax.)
C-x C-M-f away.
There's a number of possible customisations; in particular, you can use (setl ffip-find-options "...") to pass additional options to the Unix find command, which is what find-file-in-project.el calls out to under the hood.
If things appear not to work, please check and double check your spelling -- I did something like (setl ffip-regex ...) once (note the lack of the final 'p' in the variable name) and were initially quite puzzled to discover that no files were being found.
Surprised nobody mentioned https://github.com/defunkt/textmate.el (now gotta make it work on Windows...)
eproject has eproject-grep, which does exactly what you want.
With the right project definition, it will only search project files; it will ignore version control, build artifacts, generated files, whatever. The only downside is that it requires a grep command on your system; this dependency will be eliminated soon.
You can get the effect you want by using GNU Global or IDUtils. They are not Emacs specific, but they has Emacs scripts that integrate that effect. (I don't know too much about them myself.)
You could also opt to use CEDET and the EDE project system. EDE is probably a bit heavy weight, but it has a way to just mark the top of a project. If you also keep GNU Global or IDUtils index files with your project, EDE can use it to find a file by name anywhere, or you can use `semantic-symref' to find references to symbols in your source files. CEDET is at http://cedet.sf.net
For pure, unadulterated speed, I highly recommend a combination of the command-line tool The Silver Searcher (a.k.a. 'ag') with ag.el. The ag-project interactive function will make an educated guess of your project root if you are using git, hg or svn and search the entire project.
FileCache may also be an option. However you would need to add your project directory manually with file-cache-add-directory-recursively.
See these links for info about how Icicles can help here:
find files anywhere, matching any parts of their name (including directory parts)
projects: create, organize, manage, search them
Icicles completion matching can be substring, regexp, fuzzy (various kinds), or combinations of these. You can also combine simple patterns, intersecting the matches or complementing (subtracting) a subset of them