emacsmirror / global-tags

Elisp API and editor integration for GNU global

global.el

Purpose

• Provide a (unit-) testeable Emacs Lisp API that wraps global binary calls (exposed to developer).

• Optional integration to Emacs using aformentioned API with project.el and xref.el (exposed to final user).

Secondary purposes

• Integrate to main Emacs branch

• Do not expose global to the final user with commands: user should use project.el and xref.el functions

• Improve response times of queries in remote or big codebase by pre-fetching results in the background.

• Prevent Emacs from freezing when calling global. While global is meant to respond real quickly, calling it using Tramp can freeze Emacs for a few seconds.

Features

• Navigate files using project.el

• Navigate tags for current files with Imenu

• Search for tags using xref

• Do-what-I-mean: search either a symbol under cursor or header file under cursor (inside a #include)

• Pre-fetch results (list files, list tags, database location) for a snappier experience.

Usage

You can setup using GNU global as backend with any of the following two lines:

;; to use GNU Global automagically, regardless of Emacs default configuration
(add-hook 'ruby-mode-hook #'global-tags-exclusive-backend-mode)
;; to use GNU Global automagically, respecting other backends
(add-hook 'ruby-mode-hook #'global-tags-shared-backend-mode)
;; configure Imenu
(add-hook 'ruby-mode-hook #'global-tags-imenu-mode)

Alternatively, you can manually configure project.el and xref.el, add their "recognize this global handled project" to the proper places like so:

;; xref (finding definitions, references)
(add-to-list 'xref-backend-functions 'global-tags-xref-backend)
;; project.el (finding files)
(add-to-list 'project-find-functions 'global-tags-try-project-root)
;; to update database after save
(add-hook 'c++-mode-hook (lambda ()
                           (add-hook 'after-save-hook
                                     #'global-tags-update-database-with-buffer
                                     nil
                                     t)))

Reporting bugs

https://bugs.launchpad.net/global-tags.el

Submiting patches / pull requests

See https://help.launchpad.net/Code/Review/#Proposing_a_merge and https://answers.launchpad.net/launchpad/+question/267929 as stated here

Code of Conduct

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.

Related projects

• GNU global: source code tag system

• counsel-gtags: unmaintained and non-re-usable counsel interface. (my maintained fork here)

• ggtags: interface using compilation-mode. Not a re-usable library (see here). Do-what-I-mean feature was based on ggtags-find-tag-dwim.

• gxref: unmaintained

• https://github.com/alexmurray/ivy-xref: Use Ivy for xref commands.

• helm-gtags: unmaintained

• agtags: no testscript up to date, provides custom interface to final user (adds shortcuts to new commands)