I’m trying out SlickEdit as my C++ code editor. There are cool things it enables you to do quickly with keyboard shortcuts. I have seen co-workers do enough that I was convinced to try it.
So far, though, I’m a SlickEdit newbie, so when I tried to navigate from a use of a class class name to the definition of the class and got errors like this:
I wasn’t sure what to do. I did rebuild the tag file(s), seemingly to no effect.
Tags
According to the SlickEdit help file, tag files are “a database of symbol definitions and declarations®” — basically it lets you jump around from a symbol definition to references to that symbol, and from a symbol reference to its definition. And I lacked an understanding of the current state of my tag files.
Understanding, Solving
I read the help for context tagging. You can have multiple tag files: one for your compiler’s libraries (which I already had); and other “language-specific tag files”.
I could jump between reference and definition for symbols defined in my current project, and for symbols defined in the C++ standard library, but not for symbols defined in our own shared libraries (which is what I needed most of the time). Aha! I needed to create a tag file for our shared libraries, having SlickEdit process the include directory of shared headers. I did this; now I can navigate to definitions that are in our shared libraries.
Then I found it in the help page that I had been reading:
You should create a language-specific tag file for any library that is not a compiler-specific library or part of the codebase you are editting. For example, you may have local libraries that are reused from project to project.
I think the reason you don’t have to create a tags file for the part of the codebase you are editing is that for that part you would have a SlickEdit project file and I think that handles the tagging automatically.
