Friday, July 28

Etags

Nice as Emacs is for editing languages like Lisp, Lua or Python, I've never been 100% happy with it for C/C++ until now. I finally got my etags setup right. The trick is to do:

find /usr/include -name '*.h' | etags --declarations --no-globals


in your home directory and use the --include option of etags to include the generated TAG file in your home directory in your project TAG files.

This means you have a handy dictinonary you can use up to look up the function prototypes and macros in your system includes, which is something I have been missing a lot. Just looking at the function prototype itself is much better for jogging memory while in the zone, rather than having to hunt it down in a manual..