Re: Helpful in Emacs?

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 09.09.2021 23:23, Arthur Miller wrote:
> What do you need to build  xref backend you mention? As mentioned on elisp-refs
> gh page:
>
> "xref-find-references: This command is included in Emacs 25.1, but it's based on
> a text search. It is confused by comments and strings, and cannot distinguish
> between functions and variables."
>
> Would rebuilding this command to use read instead of text search do the thing?

You can easily plug another search implementation in 
xref-find-references. You can even make summaries multiline (though that 
would feel weird to me).

But is elisp-refs that much better at searching? Distinguishing 
variables from functions sounds nice, but then you might want to rename 
the function -- and you'll probably want to rename the variable with the 
same name as well.

Same about comments: if elisp-refs skips comments altogether (rather 
than smartly parsing references inside), you might miss some references 
to your function when doing a rename.

I also wonder how it compares in performance.