Tree Tags
Hassle free code navigation for the rest of us.
Motivation
The growing adoption of language servers have revolutionized the way we write software. However this has also contributed to the decline of generic software tooling.
Personally, I have found most LSP implementations to be far more distracting than useful and don’t enjoy the “magic” installation and configuration process.
In my opinion the most useful thing about LSP is the hassle-free code
navigation. Previously I’ve relied on tools like grep and ctags to
do this, but they require continual maintenance to keep indexes
updated for each project and are not always reliable, not to mention
the extra work needed to incorporate standard libraries, third-party
packages, and language built-ins.
Implementation
The plan for treetags is to build an index of definitions
“on-the-fly” for any given file. This should include definitions for
language built-ins, the standard library, and any third-party packages
(assuming they are available on the system).
My hope is that tree-sitter will be able to provide a robust parsing
backend for this project and enable accurate, high performance code
navigation.
It would be great to be able to provide a similar set of operations as LSP:
- Find definition (definitions and assignments)
- Find references
- Rename symbol
References
Apparently I’m not the only one with this idea:
- Navigating code on GitHub
- Introducing stack graphs
- Incremental, zero-config Code Nav using stack graphs
- Precise, cross-project code navigation at GitHub scale
FAQ
- Why not
cscope?- Unfortunately
cscopeis less ergonomic thanctagsand doesn’t support nearly as many languages.
- Unfortunately
- Why do you hate LSP?
- LSP is awesome, you should use it.
- However, if you enjoy LSP, you might want to consider using an IDE instead of an esoteric text editor.