RbTagger

A text-based Ruby tags system for Emacs

RbTagger is an Emacs library based on ctags, ripper-tags, and xref.el. It indexes your entire Ruby project along with gems and provides smarter than average tag lookup. It aims to provide context-aware, accurate tag lookup by parsing the current Ruby file and an easy-to-use tags solution that works out of the box.

RbTagger is currently beta software extracted from my Emacs configuration.

Features

• It indexes full projects along with gems, including the Ruby standard library;
• It indexes full Ruby modules, thanks to ripper-tags extra options.
• It has contextual tags lookup. RbTagger is aware of Ruby code and will try to jump to the most specific occurrence for the symbol at point.
• It takes into account the full Ruby module when looking for definitions. If point is on ModOne::ModTwo, more specifically at ModTwo, the searched tag will be the full module name: ModOne::ModTwo.

Prerequisites

1. Emacs 25 or greater.
2. The ruby, gem, and bundler commands must be readily accessible from within Emacs. If you're on macOS, I recommend installing the exec-path-from-shell package.

Quickstart

Installation

RbTagger is available on the two major package.el community maintained repos - MELPA Stable and MELPA. If you want to use MELPA stable, add the following repository to package-archives:

;; This code snippet should be saved to init.el
(add-to-list 'package-archives
             '("melpa-stable" . "https://stable.melpa.org/packages/") t)

If you want to stay on the bleeding edge:

(add-to-list 'package-archives
             '("melpa" . "https://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/") t)

After that, you can install RbTagger with the following command:

M-x package-install [RET] rbtagger [RET]

Basic usage

Use the following code in init.el to enable rbtagger-mode in all Ruby buffers:

;; For ruby-mode
(add-hook 'ruby-mode (rbtagger-mode))

;; For enh-ruby-mode
(add-hook 'enh-ruby-mode (rbtagger-mode))

You can generate tags for the current Ruby project with M-x rbtagger-generate-tags. I strongly recommend setting up automation either through an after-save hook or git hooks for a better experience.

After enabling the minor mode, you can find definitions for the symbol at point with M-., which is a shortcut for M-x rbtagger-find-definitions. The above keybinding replaces Emacs' keybinding for xref-find-definitions.

You can also force displaying a prompt of tags to choose from with the universal argument: C-u M-..

To pop back to where you were before, the command is still M-, or M-x xref-pop-marker-stack, which is a default xref command.

Here is a list of commands:

Keybinding	Description
M-.	rbtagger-find-definitions
M-,	xref-pop-marker-stack
C-u M-.	rbtagger-find-definitions (displays prompt)
C-c C-.	rbtagger-find-definitions-other-window
C-u C-c C-.	rbtagger-find-definitions-other-window (displays prompt)
C-c M-.	rbtagger-find-definitions-other-frame
C-u C-c M-.	rbtagger-find-definitions-other-frame (displays prompt)

I strongly recommend reading up this guide for more details on how to best use this package.

TIP: In the tag prompt, both TAB and ? are set to trigger autocomplete or display the available tag completions. To insert a literal question mark in the completion prompt (which is a valid character for Ruby methods), type C-q ?.

Generating tags

To generate TAGS, make sure the current buffer belongs to a Ruby project with a Gemfile and git as VCS, then call M-x rbtagger-generate-tags.

The above command will:

• Install the ripper-tags gem if not already installed,
• Index the main project,
• Index the Ruby standard library,
• Index all dependencies declared in Gemfile,
• Generate a single TAGS file and save it to the root of the project.

The first call to the command might take a few seconds to complete depending on the size of your project, but subsequent calls will be faster because the script will skip directories whose tags have already been generated. If the gem is a local git project, it will only be reindexed if the commit hash has changed from the previous indexing operation.

Make sure to add the following patterns to your global .gitignore:

$ echo "TAGS*" >> ~/.gitignore
$ echo ".TAGS" >> ~/.gitignore
$ echo .ruby_tags_commit_hash >> ~/.gitignore

Troubleshooting

M-x rbtagger-generate-tags will create two hidden buffers that can be accessed with the following commands:

• M-x rbtagger-stdout-log: The message log of what's being indexed;
• M-x rbtagger-stderr-log: The error log.

You can watch the output of these buffers live for troubleshooting, or after indexing. Note that they will only hold the output of the last rbtagger-generate-tags.

A message will also be displayed in the minibuffer (or the *Messages* buffer) when the command finishes, or you can configure Custom Notifications.

Looking up tags

Visiting tags tables

I recommend installing the projectile package (also available on MELPA) and enabling (projectile-mode) globally in your init.el to visit a project's TAGS file automatically when switching buffers (on Emacs' find-file-hook,) otherwise you'll have to manually manage the active tags table with M-x visit-tags-table.

Finding definitions

M-x rbtagger-find-definitions or M-. (provided that rbtagger-mode is enabled) tries to find the best match for the symbol at point by computing a list of candidates ordered by specificity. It tries to follow Ruby's Constant lookup rules as closely as possible. Given the following Ruby module:

module Tags
  module Lookup
    module Nested
      def self.call(*args)
        # Some code here...
        Rule.call(*args)
      end
    end
  end
end

Assuming that point is on Rule, RbTagger will try four candidates in order:

• Tags::Lookup::Nested::Rule
• Tags::Lookup::Rule
• Tags::Rule
• Rule

If one of the candidates resolve to one or more matches, it will either:

• Jump to the first occurrence when dealing with a single match;
• Display a list of tags to choose from when dealing with more than one match.

Subsequent candidates will be skipped.

Recommended tag settings

I recommend the following settings for a smoother tags experience with no prompts. Save them in init.el:

;; Make tag search case sensitive. Highly recommended for
;; maximum precision.
(setq tags-case-fold-search nil)

;; Reread TAGS without querying if it has changed
(setq tags-revert-without-query 1)

;; Always start a new tags list (do not accumulate a list of
;; tags) to keep up with the convention of one TAGS per project.
(setq tags-add-tables nil)

After save hook

You can automate tags generation with an after save hook. If you want to update your TAGS every time you save a Ruby file, you can setup a hook like this in your Emacs config:

(add-hook 'after-save-hook
          (lambda ()
            (if (eq major-mode 'enh-ruby-mode)
             (call-interactively 'rbtagger-generate-tags))))

If you use ruby-mode instead of enh-ruby-mode, just replace enh-ruby-mode in the above snippet.

Git hooks

It is possible to automate tags generation with the help of emacsclient when committing or running other git operations. Use the following shell script as the body of the post-commit, post-merge, and post-rewrite git hooks:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

emacsclient -e "(rbtagger-generate-tags \"$(pwd)/\")"

TIP: You can setup these hooks as git templates that are automatically copied over whenever you git init a project.

I recommend adding the following snippet to init.el to start the Emacs server when you launch Emacs:

(require 'server)
(unless (server-running-p)
  (server-start))

Custom notifications

RbTagger supports custom notifications via hooks. The hook's callable takes two arguments: success (boolean t or nil) and project-name (string). Here's an example of how it can be used on macOS to integrate with notification center:

(add-hook
 'rbtagger-after-generate-tag-hook
 (lambda (success project-name)
   (if success
       (notify-os (concat project-name " tags 👍") "Hero")
     (notify-os "Is this a Ruby project? Tags FAILED! 👎" "Basso"))))

This particular example assumes you have the following function:

(defun notify-os (message sound)
  "Send a notification to macOS's notification center.
Requires terminal-notifier to be installed via homebrew."
  (shell-command
   (combine-and-quote-strings
    (list "terminal-notifier" "-message" message "-sound" sound))))

Why a single TAGS file?

Can't we use tags-table-list to setup more than one tag file for lookup, i.e., smaller tag tables for each gem?

Certainly, but that could result in hundreds of junk buffers due to the way tags work in Emacs. In a project with 300 gems, Emacs would open 300 buffers while searching for a tag, which would greatly enlarge the buffer list. For that reason, my preference is a single TAGS file.

Where RbTagger can improve

RbTagger's source code is simple and concise on purpose and it works very well for my needs. However, it can improve in the following areas:

Contextual tag lookup

As you can see, contextual tag lookup isn't as efficient as it can be and there is room for improvement. In my experience, it will find the tag instantaneously (with 200+ gems) most of the time, but sometimes it will freeze for about 1 second. The eventual performance hit is negligible for me, but any improvements on performance, better usage of xref, or the algorithm itself would be hugely appreciated.

Tag Candidates list

Building up the candidates list is currently an indentation-based and regex-based algorithm that happens inside Emacs buffers. Ideally, it should work with static analysis but that would probably make the code more complex or add more dependencies. Being regex-based means it would not work properly without properly indented module declarations. I never found this to be a problem because all my Ruby files are indented, but again, any contributions on that front will be appreciated.

What else?

You are welcome to contribute with anything. Please send PRs!

Running tests

Through the command line in batch mode:

$ make test

Through Emacs:

1. Open test/rbtagger-test.el
2. Run M-x eval-buffer. Side-effect warning: this will add MELPA to package-archives and install dependencies.
3. Press C-c C-r to run all tests.
4. To run a single test, press M-x eval-expression and type (ert "name-of-the-test"). See ert docs for more options.

The make command with no arguments will compile rbtagger.el and run checkdoc over it. Any warnings will make the command fail.

License

Copyright © 2021 Thiago Araújo Silva.

Distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 3