Programming

I ran into a slight problem with vi jumping to a variable definition and not function when both have the same name.

Does anybody know if I can influence ctags to give preference to function over the variable?

Details of my setup:

in $MYLIB/myedi.h I have a struct with

Code:

short procname

in it.

in $SHLIB/mycode.c I have a function procname (old, new, off_days) { ... }

in $MYCODE directory I have a bunch of .c and .h files, the makefile that builds an executable and updates tags like this

Code:

 
ctags $MYCODE/*.[ch] $MYLIB/*.[ch] $SHLIB/*.[ch]

The ctags is

Code:

 
$ ctags --version
Exuberant Ctags 5.8, Copyright (C) 1996-2009 Darren Hiebert
  Compiled: Dec 10 2012, 15:42:51
  Addresses: <dhiebert@users.sourceforge.net>, http://ctags.sourceforge.net
  Optional compiled features: +wildcards, +regex

The resulting tags file has following:

Code:

 
procname        ../mylib/edi.h      /^      short          procname;\/*                             *\/$/;" m       struct:__anon35
procname        ../shlib/mycode.c /^procname(old, new, off_days)$/;"f

So, when in vi (vim 7.0) I press ctrl-] (vi's jump to command) I am landing in the mylib/edi.h, but my intesion is to jump to the function instead.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

I haven't looked at the vim code, but I believe that when you have multiple entries in your ctags file with the same tag, the one you'll go to with the vi ctl-] command varies depending on what else is in the ctags file. (I.e., you won't always go to the first matching definition found in the ctags file.)

One thing I used to do when ctl-] took me to the wrong entry was to edit the crags file (:e ctags), search for the matching entries (:g/^tag/p), and then edit the file that contained the tag I wanted. (The entry in the ctags will will give you both the filename and the line or search pattern in that file you need to get to the entry you want.)

You can also manually edit the ctags file to only contain function names (or at least to remove the entries with duplicate names that you are least likely to want to jump to in vi).

Hope this helps.