Re: [ANN] ltags - exuberant tags compatible tags generator

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 2:39 PM, Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com> wrote:
> past people have posted (prototype-like) hacks to Emacs's "Grand
> Universal Debugger" to make it able to debug Lua too...

I did lua-gdb, which fakes gdb enough to fool Emacs (in legacy GUD
mode). One of the few Lua debuggers that can hop from Lua to C and
back, but it did need to build against private headers, so I couldn't
release it via LuaRocks.

> Please do add support for the etags file format to ltags, it is going
> to be very useful!

Just been browsing Penlight with Emacs and the TAGS generated by ctags
-e and the result isn't bad really.  Going beyond functions is always
going to be tough with Lua because 'types' don't stand out clearly,
since they're implemented as a bunch of code conventions.  Simple
tools like ltags would struggle to look inside these patterns and find
table definitions and so forth.

Functions should be sufficient but having the local aliases as well
would really help - if they've been renamed - the 'foo' from "local
foo = utils.foo" works fine.

In any case, the improvement that ltags brings over ctags is that it
goes to some trouble to create the extended tag information (this
function has only file scope, this function is a member of this
'struct',...) which good old TAGS would ignore anyway.

I don't think you should worry about "very good tools to navigate
other people's code" because it's mostly "find in files" out there ;)