Re: A read-based grep-like for symbols (el-search?) (was Do shorthands break basic tooling (tags, grep, etc)? (was Re: Shorthands have landed on master))

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 02.10.2021 04:30, João Távora wrote:

> > Or make it mandatory, thus making it possible to use the approach to
> > searching I've described, and more or less guarantee it working on
> > third-party code as well.
>
> We could, but it's too soon for that.  Bear in mind, one thing is the
> Emacs repo, another thing is what you wish to do with the language.  And
> a warning would more than suitably protect the former (once we decide
> what needs to be protected and from what).  For the latter, removing a
> feature that works fine is almost immoral IMO.  You may as well forbid
> small prefixes alltogether, or heretic symbol names, or anaphoric
> macros.

Whatever search feature we end up implementing, should work on Elisp 
code anywhere, inside or outside of Emacs core.

> Rather, I think we must understand what the grep-inclined want to do.

I wasn't really describing what the users of Grep would do. If that was 
the goal, prohibiting shorthands would be the answer.

> For example it might make sense to enforce some rules for external
> symbols (the ones that one commonly searches for across files) and
> others for internal symbols.

I think the "private" symbols are largely irrelevant to this discussion. 
Unless people really are (?) going to use shorthands for them.

> > > > > But
> > > > > possible, yes.  Would you like to work on that `thing-at-pt.el` front?
> > > >
> > > > thing-at-pt? I'm not sure which particular task you are referring to.
> > > thingatpt.el, sorry.  The library used by other Elisp programs when
> > > they
> > > want to pick some text from the buffer, at point, that represents a symbol,
> > > a string, a list.  We could have some kind of "symbol-prefix" "symbol-suffix"
> > > or "symbol-part" for eventually telling grep to go search only for that part.
> >
> > I think you're rather looking at altering what
> >
> >    (get 'emacs-lisp-mode 'find-tag-default-function)
> >
> > returns.
>
> What does that do?  Returns nil here.  I'd like the approach to work
> with Leo Liu's ack.el, for example, which is the particular 'grep'
> interface I use.  It uses 'thingatpt'.

Yes, sorry. That one was for 'find-tag' and 'xref-find-definitions' with 
etags.

Tools like ack-el indeed use thingatpt, though I wonder whether we 
should add a new "thing" rather than change how 'symbol' works. That is, 
consider whether any of the existing users might not like this change.

> > > > > That's not the approach I was thinking of, but I hope to present a working
> > > > > prototype soon, which is a better way to present ideas.
> > > > Looking forward to it.
> > > Just realized the default xref-backend-references uses semantic and
> > > ede...
> > Uses a certain minor part of Semantic and doesn't use EDE.
>
> I wasn't criticizing btw.  Wouldn't be a problem if it used even a big
> part.

It's really just find-grep under the hood. Or Global, or id-utils.