Provide better tags tools configuration for the Clojure language.
Goals of the project are:
- to test tools that generate or search tags on Clojure project
- to provide optimal ways to configure those tools
- to provide tips to editor/IDE users who want to use tags tools
- and to lesser extent, to give tags tool creators a feedback on their Clojure support
- Ctags: Use a better Clojure language regexp extension
cat ctags_clj.opt >> $HOME/.ctags- Universal Ctags: Even with support for Clojure, for now you still have better results with a Ctags Clojure language regexp extension
mkdir -p $HOME/.ctags.d
cp ctags_clj.opt $HOME/.ctags.d/clojure.ctags- GNU Global: You need Pygments + Ctags parser with Clojure language
regexp extension (see above for configuration)
NB: "Find symbol usage" will mostly not work because:- Pygments Clojure parser does not separate namespace/alias from symbol name
- Pygments Clojure parser does not find symbols if they are used after a quote reader macro (#')
We all need to navigate the code of our project and for this purpose nothing is as features rich as your editor/IDE connected to a network REPL with couple of middlewares.
But you know sometimes, you already have 2 or 3 REPLs running for your projects
and you still want to skim the code of this other project or library.
Launching an other REPL is not an option, so you reach for the old working
tricks. Some of us use sharp tools like find or grep to cut their way.
Some use tags to build an efficient database of defined symbols.
Unfortunately the use of tags needs some support by tools that collect or
search them. The current landscape for Clojure is dry in this field (obviously
a REPL knows so much more about your code than static tools) but with a little
bit of tweaking, we can still make use of ctags or global.
- Use of a network REPL connected to your editor/IDE is a very efficient way to navigate your code!
- Use of a proper Clojure static code analyzer would yield vastly better results
- So now you want tags for symbols defined in dependencies.... please start that REPL!
Looking on the Web, I found two ways to use ctags
- Add Clojure file extension to the default LISP language support
- Add Clojure support by defining regular expressions
First solution is lacking a lot and the second is spread around blog posts or forum messages with relatively inconsistent definition support.
This project defines a better set of regular expressions to match more Clojure symbols: Have a look at ctags_clj.opt
You can check the output in the tags/ directory to see by yourself what symbols have been found for each solutions.
cat ctags_clj.opt >> $HOME/.ctagsUniversal Ctags is a fork or Exuberant Ctags and add a native support for Clojure, but as you can read in tags/uctags_0.0.0(4f9f6f8).tags the support is still incomplete compared to a custom regexp configuration.
mkdir -p $HOME/.ctags.d
cp ctags_clj.opt $HOME/.ctags.d/clojure.ctagshttps://www.gnu.org/software/global/global.html
GNU Global has more features than Ctags but only supports a handful of languages with its built-in parsers. Hopefully we can tweak it to make use of Pygments + Ctags as documented in the source: PLUGIN_HOWTO.pygments
First extends Ctags with our regex Clojure language configuration (see above).
Than follow religiously all the installation and configuration steps
(don't forget the env variables), you should be able to have global parsing
Clojure files using Pygments and Ctags.
NB: With global, finding usage of a symbol ONLY works if the symbol
is used without namespace/alias or quote reader macro (#')
- Pygments Clojure parser does not separate namespace/alias from symbol name
- Pygments Clojure parser does not find symbols if they are used after a quote reader macro (#')
- You can use jsfaint/gen_tags.vim plugin
- The default "Jump to definition" Vim mapping (CTRL-]) may not work because
guns/vim-clojure-static
defines the character / in
iskeyword. To have this mapping always working you can for Clojure filetype::set iskeyword-=/