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From: ch@dce.ie (Charles Bryant)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: One user's editor wish list
Message-ID: <1991Apr4.155736.23383@dce.ie>
Date: 4 Apr 91 15:57:36 GMT
Article-I.D.: dce.1991Apr4.155736.23383
References: <11032@dog.ee.lbl.gov> <1991Mar20.191434.5634@scrumpy@.bnr.ca> <11200@dog.ee.lbl.gov>
Organization: Datacode Communications Ltd, Dublin, Ireland
Lines: 36

In article <11200@dog.ee.lbl.gov> torek@elf.ee.lbl.gov (Chris Torek) writes:
>One thing missing from some non-Unix editors is `tags': vi and Emacsen
>generally have the notion of a `tags file', which contains the names
>and `locators' for things in a program.  Typing `:tag foo' means `find
>the tag for foo', and ^] means `find the tag for the word under the cursor'
>(in vi; Emacs tags generally are somewhat different).  Tags are mainly
>useful for navigating around large programs.
>
>Tags locators are regular expressions, rather than line numbers, so that
>most changes to the source do not outdate them.

Well they are actually *any* ex commands. For example the following
line in a tags file:
foo	%	!rm %
will remove the file being edited when tag `foo' is searched for.
Now if someone can point out how to use the output of such a command to
go to a line, I could devise an entry that looked up the tag when selected
instead of having a fixed table. [the command "r !echo 23|d z|@z"
springs to mind, but "r !..." dosen't respect the ex command delimeters
(|)]

My colleague Eamonn McManus (in real life em@dce.ie) just pointed out
that the ability to run commands via tags is yet another feature to
watch out for in a restricted environment.

Incidentally, I noticed that:
foo	foo	/foo/
foo	%	/foo/
are not the same (`%' expands to the current file name) even when foo
is the current file. Vi knows that `foo' won't change the current file,
but dosen't realize that `%' won't either.
-- 
Charles Bryant (ch@dce.ie)
--
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