[Geany-devel] Exuberant Ctags Support

[Matthew Brush]

On 05/25/11 06:37, Jiří Techet wrote:

>
> as this is something I wanted to do myself, I really like it! I've
> been looking at the code only so far; I'll test it once I have access
> to my computer in the evening. A few comments:

Great, thanks!

>
> 1. In tm_tag.c it would be better to have ctagKinds languageKinds[]
> separate for each language and then have allKinds array indexed by
> lang_id containing languageKinds[] of all languages. So to get to
> language's tags, you would just do allKinds[lang_id] instead of going
> through the whole list every time. (a dummy entry would be used for
> lang_id's not present in the table)

Good idea, then it only has to go through ~10 entries max before it 
finds the finds the langType (or doesn't).

>
> 2. You can get function parameters from extension fields when you run
> ctags with --fields=+S (and I believe you get variable type with "t").
> Check the man pages of ctags. I think this is safer than using your
> USE_HACKS code.

Yeah, that's certainly the way, but I wanted to support "any" CTags 
files that could be generated, particularly with the default (no) 
options/old format.  But see below.

>
> 3. More general comment - if we have ctags file parsing support, it's
> a question whether Geany should continue using the old format and its
> generation. Tags generation would be then redundant in Geany if you
> can do the same with ctags (and ctags is the right tool to generate
> tags, not a text editor). Geany's documentation would then just say
> what flags should be used for ctags in order to create all the
> necessary fields.

I wasn't thinking of it like this, but it does make sense.  The only 
problems I see are that it requires the user to have another specialized 
program to generate tags and that some languages supported by Geany are 
not supported by the CTags (at least on my system), particularly Vala 
comes to mind.  Maybe Vala support could be pushed back upstream.

Also, as above, if the user was told which flags to use for Ctags, then 
it would make the parsing code more robust.  What's more, if we used the 
Ctags format as the main format, then we could drop the pipe separated 
format as well since Ctags format is (nearly) as easy to generate by 
hand as the pipe-separated format and also Ctags program supports the 
languages that necessitated supporting that pipe-format in the first 
place I think (as the code comment says "alternative parser for Pascal 
and LaTeX global tags files...").

I personally think it's nice for Geany to be able to generate tag files 
itself though, especially since it would still have all the parsing code 
for parsing the open source files.  Dumping the list of tags parsed to a 
plain-text (Ctags format) file seems fairly trivial.  This would remove 
the need for the user to *have* to have Ctags on her system.

Interested to get people's thoughts on this.

Cheers,
Matthew Brush