CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vimctags
Jonathan
Jonathan

Reputation: 2213

Lookup a specific kind of tag in Vim

So here's my problem. I've gotten exuberant ctags working with Vim, and it works great, most of the time. One thing that still irks me though is whenever I try to search for a function that is named the same as some variable name. I sometimes get the right tag on the first try, sometimes not. Then after I pull up the list of alternate tags with :tselect, it comes up with a list of tags for both function definitions or variable definitions/assignments. (I'm in PHP so definitions and assignments are syntactically indistinguishable).

However, I notice that there's a column labeled 'kind' that has a value of 'f' or 'v', for function and variable, respectively. I can't seem to find a whole lot of information about this field, it seems like it may not be exactly standardized or widely used. My question is: can you filter tag results in Vim by "kind"?

Ideally, the default would be to search the whole tags file, but by specifying some extra flag, you could search a specific ('f' or 'v') kind only.

This is such a small problem for me as it doesn't come up THAT often, but sometimes it's the small problems that really annoy you.

Upvotes: 9

Views: 2696

Answers (3)

icc97
icc97

Reputation: 12793

fzf with fzf.vim has a :Tags (for the whole project) and :BTags for the current file option that generates ctags on the fly.

An issue raised on the plugin 'Skip tag kinds in :BTags and :Tags' gives the following code that you can use to only generated tags for a particular kind. I've modified the below so that it should only search for the PHP f kind.

command! BTagsEnhanced
        \ call fzf#vim#buffer_tags(<q-args>, [
        \ printf('ctags -f - --sort=no --php-kinds=f --excmd=number --language-force=%s %s', &filetype, expand('%:S'))], {})

Note as per my comment on the question, there is a potential Vim tagfinder.vim plugin via a blog post on Vim and Ctags: Finding Tag Definitions. But I haven't tried it.

Upvotes: 1

cdleonard
cdleonard

Reputation: 7050

I generate python ctags with --python-kinds=-i to exclude tags for import statements (which are useless). Maybe you could generate with --php-kinds=-v and drop a class of tags completely.

You can read :help tag-priority. Apparently the "highest-priority" tag is chosen based on some hard-coded logic.

Upvotes: 5

ldog
ldog

Reputation: 12151

You can certainly generate ctag files with any combination of php-kinds that you want (see the ouput of the command ctags --list-kinds.)

If you feel it's worth the effort you can make a vim function tagkind and bind it to a command. The tagkind function can overwrite the current tags vim variable to point at only the tag file with the kinds that you are interested in and call :tag. Optionally, it can store the previous version of the tags variable and restore it after this one call.

Unfortunately, I don't know of anyway other than this. Perhaps someone else would know.

Upvotes: 8

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