When I work on someone else's code, I tipically need to abuse of grep in order to find data types declarations etc, and this usually makes me confused.
I'd like to have some tool which analyzes the source code and produces some graphviz-like drawing and allows me to follow dependencies.
Also I've found this on the internet, but I think is taylored for the linux kernel only.
Have you tried doxygen?
Doxygen can produce dot files, and you can build the documentation without changing the source code with the right options set in the Doxyfile.
Do you use an editor that can take advantage of tags ? In Emacs, I just type M-. to go to the definition of a symbol, and M-* to go back to where I was once I have read it. This also enables the command tags-search to grep among the files of the software project (very convenient if they are in multiple directories).
Related
This question may be a little off topic. But I was wondering if there was a way for me to look at the descriptions of C functions using vim or neovim. Is it possible to look at their documentations by doing something like :help? This would really be helpful since I wouldn't need to lookup to my browser everytime.
I am unclear about these things:
Can :help be my friend here ?
Can I use LSPs to do something like this ?
I am using latest Neovim inside Ubunutu 20.04 in WSL. Is this helpful somehow ?
By pressing K, the keyword under the cursor is looked up using a configured keyword lookup program, the default being man. This works pretty much out of the box for the C standard library.
For C++, you might want to look at something like cppman.
Well yes, you can get the description of C functions by using a LSP (language server plugin)! Here is an image of me using clangd as my LSP:
You'd "just" need to install the LSP and start it. I don't know how familiar you're with neovim, but just in case if you don't know how to install a plugin or to be more specifique: If you don't know how you can install a LSP server, then you can do the following:
There're plenty videos how to set up a LSP-Server for your language. Here's an example.
If you don't want to set up on your own, you can pick up one of the preconfigured neovim setups (some of my friends are recommending lunarvim)
But yeah, that's it. If you have any further questions feel free to ask them in the comments.
Happy vimming c(^-^)c
Let's explain how "K" command works in more detail.
You can run external commands by prefixing them with :! command. So running man tool is as easy as
:!man <C-R><C-W>
Here <C-R><C-W> is a special key combination used to put word under cursor from text buffer down to command line.
Same for showing Vim's built-in help page
:help <C-R><C-W>
As it feels tedious to type that, Vim also defines K Normal mode command that does pretty much the same thing. Except the tool name is taken from value of an option named "keywordprg".
So doing set keywordprg=man (default for *nix systems) makes K to invoke !man tool; while set keywordprg=:help is for bultin help.
Also, the option :h 'keywordprg' is made global or local-to-buffer, so any Vim buffer is able to overwrite global setting. For example, this is already done by standard runtime for "vim" and "help" buffers, so they call ":help" instead of "man".
The problem with :!man command is that it shows "black console". It'd be nice if we could capture man's output and open it inside Vim just like a builtin help page. Then we could also apply some pretty highlighting, assign key macros and all such. This is a pretty common trick and it is already done by a standard plugin shipped with Vim/Neovim.
A command that the plugin provides is called :Man, so you can open :Man man instead of :!man man, for example. The plugin is preactivated in Neovim; for Vim you still need to source one file manually. So to make use of this plugin you'll need something like this
set keywordprg=:Man
if !has("nvim")
source $VIMRUNTIME/ftplugin/man.vim
endif
The previous answer recommending cppman is the way to go. There is no need to install a bulky language server just for the purpose of having the hover functionality. However, make sure you're caching the man pages via cppman -c. Otherwise, there will be a noticeable delay since cppman is fetching the page from cppreference.com on the fly.
If you like popups for displaying documentation, convert the uncompressed man pages (groff -t -e -mandoc -Tascii <man-page> | col -bx), and set keywordprg to your own wrapper to search for keywords according to your needs.
I'm tired of seperately having to generate a declaration in the header file for most of the functions I'm defining in my C file. Hence, I would like to automatize this.
I've found an ideal application for this: Makeheaders
Unfortunately only the sources seem to be available, no readymade binary.
Documentation: https://www.fossil-scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/src/makeheaders.html
Code: https://code.launchpad.net/~lockal/makeheaders/head
Does someone know where to get a binary? Would it be hard to somehow build it myself?
You can download the source code from here. It is a single makeheaders.c file.
then you just need to call cl.exe makeheaders.c it will generate a makeheaders.exe that you can use.
I would like to compile the following C file on an embedded platform:
https://github.com/openwsn-berkeley/openwsn-fw/blob/develop/firmware/openos/bsp/chips/at86rf231/radio.c
However, as you can see, on lines 20-26 of radio.c it references "radiotimer_capture_cbt":
typedef struct {
radiotimer_capture_cbt startFrame_cb;
radiotimer_capture_cbt endFrame_cb;
radio_state_t state;
} radio_vars_t;
radio_vars_t radio_vars;
So now I need to hunt down where it is defined and make sure I include the right header.
I have cloned the entire GIT repository here: https://github.com/openwsn-berkeley/openwsn-fw, and I'm looking for a way to compile this easily.
Is there a better way to get this compiled other than going through the brutal dependency nightmare?
My ultimate goal is only to get radio.c compiled and anything it needs. I do not see any makefiles in this project so I'm expecting they want us to use an IDE.
The project seems to use scons as a build system. So the simplest way is to dive into the scons files.
There's a small scons file in the directory containing the linked file and two main script in the top directory.
But if you want to play, first remove headers include, try to compile (using -c) to know which one are really needed. Once you get an object file (.o) you can use nm to identify missing symbols (marked with U.) Good luck …
I have a huge project, whole written in C language and I have a single make file that is used to compile it. The project C files contains lots of capitalize problems in it's header files, meaning there are tones of header files that were miss-spelled in lots of C files.
The problem is I need to migrate this project to compile on Linux machine and since Linux is case sensitive I got tones of errors.
Is there an elegant way which I can run make file in Linux and tell him to ignore case sensitive?
Any other solution will be welcome as well.
Thanks a lot.
Motti.
You'll have to fix everything by hand and rename every file or fix every place with #include. Even if you have a huge project (comparable with linux kernel), it should be possible to do this during a hour or two. Automation may be possible, but manual way should be better - because script won't be able to guess which name is right - filename, or the name used in #include.
Besides, this situation is a fault of original project developer. If he/she wasn't sloppy and named every header in every #include correctly, this wouldn't happen. Technically, this is a code problem similar to syntax error. The only right way to deal with it is to fix it.
I think it takes not too long to write a small script, which goes thru the directories first, then replaces C headers. Explained:
Scan the headers' folder and collect filenames.
Make a lowercase list of them. You have now original and locased pairs.
Scan the C source files and find each line contains "#include"
Lowercase it.
Find the lowercase filename in the list collected and lowercased from headers.
Replace the source line with the one collected from headers.
You should put the modified files into a separate folder structure, avoid overwriting the whole source with some buggy stuff. Don't forget to create target folders during the source tree scan.
I recommend a script language for that task, I prefer PHP, but just it's the only server-side script language which I know. Yep, it will run for a while, but only once.
(I bet that you will have other difficulties with that project, this problem is not a typical indicator of high quality work.)
Well I can only tell you that you need to change the case of those header files. I don't know that there is any way you can make it automatic but still you can use cscope to do it in a easier way.
http://www.linux-tutorial.info/modules.php?name=ManPage&sec=1&manpage=cscope
You can mount the files on a case-insensitive file system. FAT comes to mind. ntfs-3g does not appear to support this.
I use the find all and replace all functionality of Source Insight when i have to do complete replacement. But your problem seems quite big, but you can try the option to replace every header file name in all occurences of source files using the
"Find All" + "Replace" functionality. You can use notepad++ too for doing the same.
A long time ago there was a great tool under MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Workshop) called Canon. It was used to canonize text files, i.e. make all symbols found in a given refernce list have have the same usage of upper/lower case. This tool would be ideal for a task like this - I wonder if anything similar exists under Linux ?
I would like to automatically generate a Makefile dependency list, but I am using Visual Studio 2005. If I were using GCC, I could pass -M (or one of the many variants) to create this dependency list.
Looking through the command line options to cl.exe, I don't see anything obvious. I can handle tweaking the output with post-processing, but the closer the better.
In the cl.exe of Visual Studio 2005 at least, there is the option /showIncludes.
I had to deal with that exact problem. We wanted to add a script that replaces the -M option. Here's how I did it:
find a source preprocessor ( and the include paths & defines you need )
run it on the file you need, and it should produce a preprocessed version.
most preprocessors have a switch that enables extra info ( such as the file where some code snippet came from )
write a simple script to extract all the header names
create a set out of them, so that you filter out duplicates.
It's how I've done it, and it worked. Good luck!
The compiler stores dependencies in the intermediate .idb file. You might be able to parse it from there.
See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/kfz8ad09.aspx
You can find all included files prefixed with "/mr/inversedeps/" or "/ipm/header/" in there, it seems.
I think you should also find dependencies in other intermediate files, e.g. "CL.read.1.tlog".
Not directly with cl.exe, but with this wrapper you can achieve what you're looking for:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y209k0z6.aspx
We had the exact same issue with Fortran, and ended up having to write our own mini-compiler to scan the source code and traverse all the #includes.