Is there any plugin for VIM that I can use to index an C++ project code base?
I would apreciate functionalities like being capable of specifing a class and and may be a method and see what file/line the method/class is defined.
Regarding code navigation (and completion),
I'd take a look at clang_indexer (and clang_complete) --
ctag understanding of C++ code is quite bad, but universal-ctags has greatly improved the situation ; cscope understanding of C++ is non-existent.
Regarding plugins for C++ coding,
I have a suite for C and C++ programming. It is mainly oriented toward C++ programming, however a few, and unique features can be used in C as well:
context sensitive snippets (they require other plugins I'm maintaining);
a way to jump to a function definition from its declaration (or create it on the fly if it doesn't exists yet) (it used to requires the plugin alternate, which is a must have, however that I've forked it for my own needs) -> :GOTOIMPL;
a little tool that lists functions with a declaration and no definition, or functions with a definition and no declaration (NB: I haven't used it against C static function yet) (it requires ctags).
:Override that searches for overridable functions
:DOX that analyses C++ function signature to generate the appropriate (customizable) doxygen comment (with \param, \throw, ...)
a mapping to include the header file where the symbol under the cursor is defined* (which requires an up-to-date ctags base)
and few other things
Otherwise, I also use:
plugins like project/local_vimrc in order to have project specific settings ;
searchInRuntime to open/jump to files without the need to browse the directories of the current project ;
a refactoring plugin (that still lacks a few things ...) ;
a wrapper around :make in order to do background compiling, and to filter &makeprg results (e.g. pathnames conversions between cygwin posix form and dos form ; application of STLfilt ; etc.) (-> BuildToolWrapper which is stable, but still in an alpha stage) ;
and a few other things which have already been mentioned (alternate, ctags, ...).
Other Plugins.
Other people use c.vim, other templating systems (snipmate & co), pyclewn (that I highly recommend for debugging (with gdb) from within vim), other bracket-surrounding-and-expansion systems, ...
PS: I've answered, slightly differently, a question on the same subject on quora.
cscope is a nice tool for browsing. There is nice tutorial here.
ctags is another nice tool, I use it in my projects. Tutorial here. If you are in Ubuntu, you can install ctags by doing:
apt-get install exuberant-ctags
gtags is another tool.
I use taglist extensively.
The "Tag List" plugin is a source code browser for the Vim editor. It provides an overview of the structure of source code files and allows you to efficiently browse through source code files in different programming languages. It is the top-rated and most-downloaded plugin for the Vim editor.
Related
This is a potentially dangerous question because interdisciplinary questions and answers will be biased, but I'll have a stab at it anyway. All in good spirit!
So, here we go. I'm writing a major editing mode for Emacs for the language that it has almost no support for yet. And I'm at the point, where I have to decide on a way to generate project files. Below is the syllabus of the task ahead:
The templates have to represent project directory tree, not only single files.
The resulting files are of various formats, potentially including SGML-like languages, but not limited to this variety. They also have to generate C-like source code and, eLisp source code and plain text files, like README, for example.
The templates must be processed in a batch upon user-initiated action (as in user wants to create a project - several files must be created in the user-appointed directory). It may be beneficial to have an ability to supervise the creation, but this is less important then the ability to run the process entirely automatically.
Bonus features:
The template language has already a user base (with a potential of reuse of existing templates).
The templates can be used for code snippets (contain blanks which are filled interactively once the user invokes code-generating routine while editing the file).
Obvious things like cross-platform-ness, ease of use both through graphical interface and command line.
I made a research, but I won't share my results (yet) so I won't bias the answers. The problem with answering this question is not that the answer is hard to find, but that it is hard to chose one from many.
I'm developing a system based on Mustache for exactly the use case that you've described. The template language itself is a very simple extension of Mustache called Groome.
I also released a command-line tool called Molt that renders Groome templates. I'd be curious to know if it does everything that you need. I'm still adding features to the tool and haven't yet announced it. Thanks.
I went to solve a similar problem several years aback, where I wanted to use Emacs to generate code out of a UML diagram (cogre), and also generate Makefiles from project specifications. I first tried to use Tempo, but when I tried to get the templates to nest, I ran into problems. I also looked into skeleton, but that didn't quite fit the plan either.
I ended up using Google Templates for a little bit, and liked the syntax, and developed SRecode instead, and just borrowed the good bits from Google templates. SRecode was written specifically for machine-generated code. The interaction for template insertion (aka - what tempo was written for) isn't first class in SRecode. For generating code from a data structure, however, it is very robust, and has a lot of features, and automatically filled variables. It works closely with your major mode, and allows many nested templates, with control over the nested dictionary values. There is a subsystem that will use Semantic tags and generate code from them for a couple languages. That means you can parse code in one language with Semantic, and generate code in another language with SReocde using those tags. Nifty! Many parts of CEDET Reference manuals were built that way.
The templates themselves allow looping, if statements, and include statements. There are a couple examples in SRecode for making an 'application', such as the comment writer, and EDE uses it to create Makefiles, which is almost exactly what you are trying to do.
Another option is Generator, which offers “language-agnostic project bootstrapping with an emphasis on simplicity”. Installation requires Node.js and npm.
Generator’s emphasis on simplicity means it is very easy to learn how to make a template. Generator also saves you from having to reference templates by file paths – it looks for templates in ~/.generator.
However, there is no way to write README or LICENSE files for the template itself without those files being copied to the generated project. Also, post-generation commands written in the Makefile will be copied to the generated Makefile, even after they are no longer of use. Finally, the ad-hoc templating language doesn’t provide a way to escape its __lowercasevariables__ – though I can’t think of a language where that limitation would be a problem.
I'm working on some custom C++ static code analysis for my PHD thesis. As part of an extension to the C++ type system, I want to take a C++ code base and enumerate its available functions, methods, and classes, along with their type signatures, with minimal effort (it's just a prototype). What's the best approach to doing something like this quickly and easily? Should I be hacking on Clang to spit out the information I need? Should I look at parsing header files with something like SWIG? Or is there an even easier thing I could be doing?
GCCXML, based on GCC, might be the ticket.
As I understand it, it collects and dumps all definitions but not the content of functions/methods.
Others will likely mention CLANG, which certainly parses code and must have access to the definitions of the symbols in a compilation unit. (I have no experience here).
For completeness, you should know about our DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit
with its C++ Front End. (The CLANG answers seem to say "walk the AST"). The DMS solution provides an enumerable symbol table containing all the type information. You can walk the AST, too, if you want.
Often a static analysis leads to a diagnosis, and a desire to change the source code.
DMS can apply source-to-source program transformations to carry out such changes conditioned
by the analysis.
I heartily recommend LLVM for statical analysis (see also Clang Static Analyzer)
I think your best bet is hacking on clang and getting the AST. There is a good tutorial for that here. Its very easy to modify its syntax and it also has a static analyzer.
At my work, I use the API from a software package called "Understand 4 C++" by scitools. I use this to write all my static analysis tools. I even wrote a .NET API to wrap their C API. Which I put on codeplex.
Once you have that, dumping all class types is easy:
ClassType[] allclasses = Database.GetAllClassTypes()
foreach (ClassType c in allclasses)
{
Console.WriteLine("Class Name: {0}", c.NameLong);
}
Now for a little backstory about a task I had that is similar to yours.
In some years we have to keep our SDK binary backwards compatible with the previous years SDK. In that case it's useful to compare the SDK code between releases to check for potential breaking changes. However with a couple of hundred files, and tens of thousands of lines of comments that can be a big headache using a text diff tool like Beyond Compare or Araxis. So what I really need to look at is actual code changes, not re-ordering, not moving code up and down in the file, not adding comments etc...
So, a tool I wrote to dump out all the code.
In one text file I dump all all the classes. For each class I print its inheritance tree, its member functions both virtual and non-virtual. For each virtual function I print what parent class virtual methods it overrides (if any). I also print out its member variables.
Same goes with the structs.
In another file I print all the macro's.
In another file I print all the typedefs.
Then using this I can diff these files with files from a previous release. It then becomes apparent instantly what has changed from release to release. For instance it's easy to see where a function parameter was changed from TCHAR* to const TCHAR* for instance.
You might consider developping a GCC Plugin for your purpose.
And GCC MELT is a high level domain specific language (that I designed & implemented) for easily extend GCC.
The paper at GROW09 workshop by Peter Collingbourne and Paul Kelly on a A Compile-Time Infrastructure for GCC Using Haskell might be relevant for your work.
This is basically a duplicate of:
Netbeans or Eclipse for C++?
But, that question as 3+ years old, and a lot has changed since then.
I have a large code base with a custom (but Makefile based) build system. The areas I am specifically wondering about include:
Syntax highlighting
Code navigation.
Code hints.
"ReSharper style" code helpers.
Documentation integration.
Debugger UI and features.
Has anyone had the chance to evaluate both Netbeans and Eclipse?
EDIT: As a followup question, are any of the Netbeans users here concerned with its future given Oracle's recent bad history with "open" efforts? (Open Solaris, MySQL, Open Office)
Thank you
I cannot comment on eclipse, but on netbeans 7 I will say things that are very important for me and that work fine so far:
code completion, go to declarations
pkg-config automatic include management for parsing
stuff that sometimes works and sometimes don't
find usages, sometimes it might fail to find usages in other open projects
debugger sometimes gets confused with unittest-cpp macros and it will not go on the appropiate line
stuff that are not yet working and i care deeply:
C++0x syntax highlighting (auto, lambdas, enum class, variadic templates, none of them are recognized by the built-in parser)
stuff that is not quite working but i could not care less:
git integration. I enjoy using git from command-line so this is a non-issue
in all, the IDE is very usable. I hope to have a chance to try out latest cdt on Indigo Eclipse, but so far i haven't that much of a real reason to investigate
I cannot comment on Netbeans, but I can offer you information on Eclipse. I work with C++ on UNIX systems, and I have started to use Eclipse when exploring large code bases that I know little about. I don't use it to build, but it would be easy to integrate our build system with it as one only needs commands.
Eclipse has most of what you are looking for: (I'm speaking of Eclipse/CDT)
Not only can you completely customize your syntax highlighting, you can also have it format the code with templates. My company has a code standard for spacing, tabs and formatting of functions and conditional code, and with little effort I was able to modify an existing template to meet our code standards.
The navigation is not bad, if you highlight and hover over a variable, it shows you the definition in a small pop-up bubble. If you do the same for a type, it will you show you where the type is defined. For functions, it will show the first few lines of the implementation of the function, with an option to expand it and see the whole function. I find all of these nice for code discovery and navigation. You can also highlight a variable, and use a right-click menu option to jump to its declaration.
I suppose by code hints you are referring to something like intellisense? This is the main reason why I use Eclipse when looking over a large code base. Just hit the '.' or '->' and a second later you get your options.
The debugger UI is quite capable. You can launch gdb within the tool and it allows you to graphically move through your code just as you would in a tool like ddd or Visual C++. It offers standard features like viewing registers, memory, watching variables, etc.
That being said, I have found some weaknesses. The first is that it doesn't really strongly support revision control systems outside of CVS and SVN very easily (integrated into the GUI). I found a plug-in for the system we use at my company, but it spews XML and Unicode garbage. It was easier to just use the revision control on the command line. I suspect this is the plug-in's issue and not Eclipse. I wish there were better tool integration though.
The second complaint is that for each project I have to manually setup the include directories and library paths. Perhaps with an environment variable this could be circumvented? Or I may just do not know how to set things up correctly. Then again if it is not obvious to a developer how to do this, I consider that a weakness of the tool.
All in all I like working with Eclipse. It is not my main editing environment, but I appreciate it for working on large code bases.
I'm a huge fan of Netbeans. I am in a similar situation to yours, but creating the project was very easy. Just point Netbeans at where the code is checked out and it figures out most things for itself. I rarely have to do any configuration. One thing to note though, if your tree is very large, it can take some time to fully index - and while it does, memory and cpu will be hosed on the box.
The integration with cvs is awesome, and the Hudson integration is very cool for CB. I've not used Git myself, though I should imagine it's a no-brainer.
One thing that does irritate me no end is that it does not behave very well with code relying heavily on templates. i.e. shows lots of warnings and errors about types not being found etc.
I have not used the latest version of Eclipse, I tried the major release before the current one and gave up because it did not have the same smooth project integration with the makefiles etc. I find it's not as nice if you don't want to use it's make system - though I could be wrong.
I don't use any of the code formatting provided, I instead prefer something like AStyle instead. I know that NetBeans does a good job with Java - but have not used it for C++. CDT I seem to remember doing some odd stuff with indentation when formatting C++ code - esp. if templates are involved - but that was atleast two years ago.
Hope some of it helps - the best way to do this is to download and try for yourself and see what works for you. Anything we tell you is purely subjective.
I used to work with Netbeans with MinGW, I Just tried 7.0.1.
I currently use Eclipse Indigo with CDT and MinGW - It's better performance wise (less CPU & Memory).
Netbeans creates a makefile to compile all the time,
In Eclipse you can build directly with the CDT-Toolchain or use Makefile - Eclipse is more flexible.
Debugging: Netbeans might be better in Solaris/Linux.
I Personally rather eclipse over Netbeans, I think eclipse is more professional.
One particular issue that causes me quite a lot of grief with Netbeans 7.0 is that it tends to want to work with utf8 files, and not all of out c++ projects are utf8. It will issue a warning about opening such a file, and if you do open it, will corrupt said file, which is a pain.
I've not found out how to properly make netbeans handle this. Apparently the encoding can be changed, but for the entire project. So presumably changing it to us-acii would stop this problem, although non ascii characters wouldn't display properly.
Any suggestions on a quality way to tag and search c++ code. I use cscope/ctags for most stuff, but I have found it insufficient to find my way around some of the overly complex c++ code at work. I have started to switch from vim to Slickedit (which is still not perfect, but better) for browsing code, but would like to go back to exclusively vim.
What I would like is something that can understand scope of class members so, for instance, if I search for references to a member of a class where the same member name exists in other classes (and possibly out of c++ code) it will only give me the relevant references.
I'd prefer something that already works nice with vim, but any open source package such that I might create a plugin myself would be fine.
Any suggestions appreciated, thanks.
Are you sure you called ctags with the right options? For C++, I use:
ctags --c++-kinds=+p --fields=+iaS --extras=+q --language-force=C++
This is what the documentation has to say about the --c++-kinds=+p option:
When parsing a C++ member function definition (e.g.
"className::function"), ctags cannot determine whether the scope specifier
is a class name or a namespace specifier and always lists it as a class name
in the scope portion of the extension fields. Also, if a C++
function is defined outside of the class declaration (the usual case), the
access specification (i.e. public, protected, or private) and
implementation information (e.g. virtual, pure virtual) contained in the function
declaration are not known when the tag is generated for the function
definition. It will, however be available for prototypes
(e.g --c++-kinds=+p).
The --fields=+iaS option:
a Access (or export) of class members
i Inheritance information
S Signature of routine (e.g. prototype or parameter list)
The --extras=+q option:
Because, by default, ctags only generates tags for the separate identifiers found in the source files. If you specify the --extra=+q option, then ctags will also generate a
second, class-qualified tag for each class member (data and function/method) in the form class::member for C++, and in the form class.method for Eiffel and Java.
The --language-force=C++ option:
By default, ctags automatically selects the language of a source file, ignoring those files whose language cannot be determined (see SOURCE FILES, above). This option forces the specified language (case-insensitive; either built-in or user-defined) to be used for every supplied file instead of automatically selecting the language based upon its extension. In addition, the special value auto indicates that the language should be automatically selected (which effectively disables this option).
use doxygen its a great tool to browse code and see classes and members relations with each other. the tool produces clickable html output for your source code with references for each usage. you can compile it to a searchable chm file or use a web server to search the code for keywords.
Try GNU global http://www.gnu.org/software/global/
It can generate navigate:able web pages of your source code as well as having support for vim and a command line interface that is often useful.
I've no experience with this, but I have used Doxygen to browse the source code of complex projects. Just run it with all the settings turned on, and it will generate call graphs, callee graphs, reference and referenced-by relations, template instantiations, etc. Output formats include HTML, LaTeX, CHM, POD
Hope this works!
For a while I have been mixing different tools for this purposes. Vi is a great editor and you can run it over remote computers without hassles, but the completion information is not semantical.
When confronted with a big problem I tend to use either Eclipse CDT or QTCreator, in both cases the latest versions, versions from a year back are not really so nice. QTCreator is a lightweight tool, but I have been quite impressed on its ability to analyze the code. Eclipse CDT is heavier weight, but I am a little more used to the interface, so at the end I tend to use it.
The project I am working on is compiled within a separated sandbox, where none of those two IDEs can be used, but you can get a copy of the repository just for analysis and use the IDE just as a browsing tool.
instead of extras, extra worked for me. Also specified -R to scan all files/folders recursively.
ctags -R --c++-kinds=+p --fields=+iaS --extra=+q --language-force=C++
In a nutshell, I'm searching for a working autocompletion feature for the Vim editor. I've argued before that Vim completely replaces an IDE under Linux and while that's certainly true, it lacks one important feature: autocompletion.
I know about Ctrl+N, Exuberant Ctags integration, Taglist, cppcomplete and OmniCppComplete. Alas, none of these fits my description of “working autocompletion:”
Ctrl+N works nicely (only) if you've forgotton how to spell class, or while. Oh well.
Ctags gives you the rudiments but has a lot of drawbacks.
Taglist is just a Ctags wrapper and as such, inherits most of its drawbacks (although it works well for listing declarations).
cppcomplete simply doesn't work as promised, and I can't figure out what I did wrong, or if it's “working” correctly and the limitations are by design.
OmniCppComplete seems to have the same problems as cppcomplete, i.e. auto-completion doesn't work properly. Additionally, the tags file once again needs to be updated manually.
I'm aware of the fact that not even modern, full-blown IDEs offer good C++ code completion. That's why I've accepted Vim's lack in this area until now. But I think a fundamental level of code completion isn't too much to ask, and is in fact required for productive usage. So I'm searching for something that can accomplish at least the following things.
Syntax awareness. cppcomplete promises (but doesn't deliver for me), correct, scope-aware auto-completion of the following:
variableName.abc
variableName->abc
typeName::abc
And really, anything else is completely useless.
Configurability. I need to specify (easily) where the source files are, and hence where the script gets its auto-completion information from. In fact, I've got a Makefile in my directory which specifies the required include paths. Eclipse can interpret the information found therein, why not a Vim script as well?
Up-to-dateness. As soon as I change something in my file, I want the auto-completion to reflect this. I do not want to manually trigger ctags (or something comparable). Also, changes should be incremental, i.e. when I've changed just one file it's completely unacceptable for ctags to re-parse the whole directory tree (which may be huge).
Did I forget anything? Feel free to update.
I'm comfortable with quite a lot of configuration and/or tinkering but I don't want to program a solution from scratch, and I'm not good at debugging Vim scripts.
A final note, I'd really like something similar for Java and C# but I guess that's too much to hope for: ctags only parses code files and both Java and C# have huge, precompiled frameworks that would need to be indexed. Unfortunately, developing .NET without an IDE is even more of a PITA than C++.
Try YouCompleteMe. It uses Clang through the libclang interface, offering semantic C/C++/Objective-C completion. It's much like clang_complete, but substantially faster and with fuzzy-matching.
In addition to the above, YCM also provides semantic completion for C#, Python, Go, TypeScript etc. It also provides non-semantic, identifier-based completion for languages for which it doesn't have semantic support.
There’s also clang_complete which uses the clang compiler to provide code completion for C++ projects. There’s another question with troubleshooting hints for this plugin.
The plugin seems to work fairly well as long as the project compiles, but is prohibitively slow for large projects (since it attempts a full compilation to generate the tags list).
as per requested, here is the comment I gave earlier:
have a look at this:
Vim integration to MonoDevelop
for .net stuff at least..
OmniCompletion
this link should help you if you want to use monodevelop on a MacOSX
Good luck and happy coding.
I've just found the project Eclim linked in another question. This looks quite promising, at least for Java integration.
I'm a bit late to the party but autocomplpop might be helpful.
is what you are looking for something like intellisense?
insevim seems to address the issue.
link to screenshots here
Did someone mention code_complete?
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1764
But you did not like ctags, so this is probably not what you are looking for...