Finding the declaration of a variable in Emacs

Posted Sep 3, 2018 22:08 UTC (Mon) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: C considered dangerous by cpitrat
Parent article: C considered dangerous

Well there's emacs, which supports it too.

Do tell. How do I point to a local variable use and have Emacs show me where its declaration is?

I know about Etags - But I don't think this is among its functions.

Finding the declaration of a variable in Emacs

Posted Sep 4, 2018 9:34 UTC (Tue) by cpitrat (subscriber, #116459) [Link]

You can use exuberant-ctags. By default, it doesn't include local variables but you can have them with --c-kinds=+l.
To produce file for emacs you also need -e.
So something like:
ctags -e --c-kinds=+l .

Then you can jump to local variable declarations using M-.

Finding the declaration of a variable in Emacs

Posted Sep 7, 2018 10:57 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

You can have Semantic / CEDET show you the definition of the symbol under point after a short delay in the echo area via semantic-idle-local-symbol-highlight-mode, also enableable globally for all buffers, and automatically via adding global-semantic-idle-local-symbol-highlight-mode to semantic-default-submodes.

Doing this for non-local symbols requires CEDET to know how to locate things in your project, which usually happens more or less automatically, particularly if you use etags or GNU GLOBAL.