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I must be missing something, but what is the advantage of this over something like Emacs Tags (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsTags https://www.emacswiki.o

I must be missing something, but what is the advantage of this over something like Emacs Tags (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsTags https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsTags) ?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
vic8722 10y ago
Building a tags file is not trivial.For example if you cloned a random repository on github you'd want to just jump around and not have to have the additional step of generating it and keeping it up to date.
- parent5446 10y ago
  Can't it just be done automatically and on-the-fly using ctags or another appropriate command?
  - vic8722 10y ago
    Perhaps, but I've never seen a straightforward guide to doing that. Particuarly that was generic enough that would automatically work with new projects, but I'd be thrilled to be proven wrong.
  - pmontra 10y ago
    Maybe this changed in the last few years but the problem with TAGS files was that you have to rebuild it at every change you make. I had a cron that rebuilt the ones of the projects I was working on, but it's not efficient and not up to date. Maybe a process that monitors changes to files is a better approach. Still, rebuilding the TAGS file is useless if ag is fast enough. SSDs and lots of RAM to cache files help. The only problem with ag is that it can't find definitions until you save the buffer to a file. Not that ctags does any better. Some tool running inside emacs could do that too but it's not so important.
    - gpderetta 10y ago
      It shouldn't be too hard to write a grep-buffers command (I was using one version for a while), exclude open files from ag searches and merge the result of ag+grep-buffers in a single output (eh, in fact I should just write it).
Myrmornis 10y ago
One major advantage is that approaches like this just work, with zero configuration, and zero persistent state to be wrong. `git grep` (and ag) are very fast on modern laptops. That changes considerations dramatically from 10 or 20 years ago or whenever TAGS were introduced.

I must be missing something, but what is the advantage of this over something like Emacs Tags (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsTags https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsTags) ?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

vic8722 10y ago

Building a tags file is not trivial.For example if you cloned a random repository on github you'd want to just jump around and not have to have the additional step of generating it and keeping it up to date.

parent5446 10y ago
Can't it just be done automatically and on-the-fly using ctags or another appropriate command?
- vic8722 10y ago
  Perhaps, but I've never seen a straightforward guide to doing that. Particuarly that was generic enough that would automatically work with new projects, but I'd be thrilled to be proven wrong.
- pmontra 10y ago
  Maybe this changed in the last few years but the problem with TAGS files was that you have to rebuild it at every change you make. I had a cron that rebuilt the ones of the projects I was working on, but it's not efficient and not up to date. Maybe a process that monitors changes to files is a better approach. Still, rebuilding the TAGS file is useless if ag is fast enough. SSDs and lots of RAM to cache files help. The only problem with ag is that it can't find definitions until you save the buffer to a file. Not that ctags does any better. Some tool running inside emacs could do that too but it's not so important.
  - gpderetta 10y ago
    It shouldn't be too hard to write a grep-buffers command (I was using one version for a while), exclude open files from ag searches and merge the result of ag+grep-buffers in a single output (eh, in fact I should just write it).

Myrmornis 10y ago

One major advantage is that approaches like this just work, with zero configuration, and zero persistent state to be wrong. `git grep` (and ag) are very fast on modern laptops. That changes considerations dramatically from 10 or 20 years ago or whenever TAGS were introduced.