bug#23179: 25.0.92; Restore `M-,' to continue etags search

[Anders Lindgren]

Hi!

 

As far as user feedback goes, I need more than "the new key bindings are different from the old ones". In-depth discussion of new generic commands and their semantics would be welcome.

I really hope that you see my feedback as the latter and not the former. Apart from that, I'll refrain from commenting.

If nobody steps up to implement your incremental search UI soon, though, we'll most likely release Emacs 25.1 with the current xref UI.

If xref doesn't provide something similar to tags-search and tags-query replace, I would say that it's more likely that Emacs 25.1 will be released with M-, bound to tags-loop-continue -- as this will make both the old tags commands and the new xref system work. All we need to do is to find a new binding for xref-pop-marker-stack.

Please test the attached patch. I'd like to know if there are cases when the highlighting overhead is noticeable.

I'll test it when I have a time slot available.

You've never used e.g. xref-find-references?

No. I went into this with the eyes of an existing tags user, and reported the problems I saw.

> You might check which versions of 'find' and 'grep' you're using, though: does M-x rgrep work all right? I remember there were some older versions of these tools compiled for Windows, with pathological performance.

That's probably it. I have some kind of unix commands installed, apparently they are not up to scratch. I'll try the tools Eli suggested.

However, most Windows users doesn't even have unix tools installed -- so it's a really bad idea to assume that tools like `find' and `grep' are available when running under Windows (at least until Emacs provide all the tools needed).

> Project commands just need a version-controlled directory to be called from. Are you not using version control for the project in question?

Yes, of course we use version control. Unfortunately, we use a collection of repositories, so it's not possible to point to a root directory.

> You've also never answered the questions about the command's semantics, above. If you want to see xref-find-regexp, I suggest you do that.

I think that I have done that. But I'll try again: I would like an incremental, UI-free, free text search (like tags-search and tags-query-replace). It's up to the backend to decide which files should be included in the search. In the tags case, all files referred to the tags file should be included. For other environments, public interfaces to used libraries could be included.

    -- Anders