From: Sam Roberts <sroberts@...>
Date: 2005-03-24T09:25:43+09:00
Subject: exctags deficiencies (was Re: Getting the word to conventional programmers)

Quoting joevandyk@gmail.com, on Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 06:35:36AM +0900:
> I'm a vim diehard, but it would be nice to have something like ctags
> or similar for Ruby.  It would be great to hit a key and see a list of
> the available functions and their arguments.  One of the problem(s)
> probably would be that every class in Ruby has a ton of available
> functions, as they all inherit from a base class.

I've never seen a version of tags that searches inheritance trees for
methods..

Quoting pete@petta-tech.com, on Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 06:56:30AM +0900:
> >I'm a vim diehard, but it would be nice to have something like ctags
> >or similar for Ruby.  
> I'm using ctags and ruby.  Maybe it's your version of ctags?  Exuberant 
> Ctags (ctags.sf.net) has supported every language I've thrown at it.

Yeah, but its support for ruby is really weak. Lots of language
constructs it doesn't support.

Biggest thing that hurs me is that it doesn't do qualified tags. jumping
to the tag for "to_s" isn't going to get you anwhere in ruby that you
want to go.

If either of you are interested, I've hacked rdoc to generate tags for
methods so that

  module Foo
    module Bar::None
      class Joe
        def to_s
        end
      end
    end
  end

  will create a tag for

  to_s
  Joe.to_s
  None.to_s
  Bar.None.to_s
  Foo.Bar.None.to_s

among other things, this allows you to semi-navigate class hierarchies,
you can type:

  Bar.None<TAB>

and see a list of all the next matches, all the tags in None.

Its a quick hack, and has some problems. I mean to go back to it, I know
more about tags now, I think I could do better. I want tags for
constants, for example (exctags doesn't do that either).

I'm not trashing the work of whoever did exctags. Parsing ruby is hard,
and to get tags of the same quality of C++/Java/C you can look at what
they had to do... and shudder. Its close to a full parser! Thats why I
used rdoc, its a pretty good ruby parser, though a bit slow.

Mail me off list if you want the rdoc diffs.

Cheers,
Sam