Re: [9fans] Codebase navigation and using tags files in acme

[Nick Owens <mischief@offblast.org>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3171 bytes --]

that's a long winded way of saying 'use the plumber'

On Tue, Aug 17, 2021, 23:54 sirjofri <sirjofri+ml-9fans@sirjofri.de> wrote:

> Hello Ben,
>
> 17.08.2021 22:22:09 Ben Hancock <ben@benghancock.com>:
> > I've just recently started using the acme editor and am really enjoying
> > it, and trying to get the hang of the "acme way" of doing things. One
> > bit of functionality that I'm familiar with from other editors is the
> > ability to easily look up a function or symbol definition within a
> > codebase. In Emacs and vi, this is done by generating tags files (etags
> > or ctags), which those editors can parse and allow you to easily jump
> > to a definition of the symbol under the point/cursor.
>
> The original developers of Plan 9 software were people who made simple
> things even simpler so they can understand them. Imagine your codebase is
> so small that you can know many symbols and have other symbols open or at
> least know where to look. Using g(rep) in the parent directory of your
> project and your brain should be enough. If it isn't your project might
> be too complex/large.
>
> (That's different when reading other code or revisiting code after a long
> time, but then you are supposed to read it again so you can understand it
> anyway.)
>
> > What's the preferred method or workflow for achieving this in acme? I
> > have tried passing a selected symbol to 'g -n' in the window's tag,
> > using the Mouse-2 + Mouse-1 chord. That gets me part of the way there
> > but isn't effective if the file where the symbol is defined happens to
> > be in another directory. I feel like I'm missing something.
> 
> I doubt you are missing something. People used to use text editor since
> there were no IDEs, and keep in mind that the core of unix was written
> with ed, maybe even on teletypes. It's like writing code on paper, and it
> works.
> 
> My advise is, read and produce good clean code. If you need syntax
> highlighting and fancy IDE stuff your codebase is probably too large.
> With more training you can work with larger codebases, but still they to
> keep it simple and small. If you really need to work with extremely
> complex codebases you likely won't find success using plan9 at all.
> 
> Many plan9 tools are one C file only. In acme you can jump between
> selected text by right clicking it, which works very well in these cases.
> Right clicking included files opens them and you can search there. These
> are basically the tools you have.
> 
> I'm personally very happy reading man pages and searching the plan 9
> source with g(rep) and plumbing the results.
> 
> I hope this helps.
> 
> Oh, and you can always write your own tools and call them using
> middle-click in acme. You could write an rc-script that cd..s to your
> project home directory (if it's a git repo, the one containing .git) and
> invokes g, for example.
> 
> sirjofri

------------------------------------------
9fans: 9fans
Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tf8ceac12df9da674-M8b0bad52403f628bb89eebec
Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 4810 bytes --]