Using cscope to browse Python code with VIM?

Question

Has anyone managed successfully using cscope with Python code? I have VIM 7.2 and the latest version of cscope installed, however it doesn't get my code's tags correctly (always off by a couple of lines). I tried the pycscope script but its output isn't supported by the modern version of cscope.

Any ideas? Or an alternative for browsing Python code with VIM? (I'm specifically interested in the extra features cscope offers beyond the simple tags of ctags)

Answer 1

EDIT: I'm going to run through the process step by step:

Preparing the sources:

exhuberant ctags, has an option: -x

   Alternatively,  ctags  can generate a cross reference file which lists,
   in human readable form, information about the  various  source  objects
   found in a set of language files.

This is the key to the problem:

 ctags -x $(ls **/*.py);                  # replace with find if no zsh

will give you your database of source objects in a known, format, described under

 man ctags;                               # make sure you use exuberant ctags!

Gnu Global is not limited to only the "out of the box" type of files. Any regular file format will serve.

Also, you can use gtags-cscope, which comes with global as mentioned in section 3.7 of the manual, for a possible shortcut using gtags. You'll end up with an input of a ctags tabular file which Global/gtags can parse to get your objects, or you can use the source for pycscope together with your ctags file of known format to get an input for the vim cscope commands in

if_cscope.txt.

Either way it's quite doable.

Perhaps you'd prefer idutils?

Definintely possible since

z3c.recipe.tags

on pypi makes use of both ctags and idutils to create tag files for a buildout, which is a method I shall investigate in short while.

Of course, you could always use the greputils script below, it has support for idutils , we know idutils works with python, and if that fails, there is also something called vimentry from this year that also uses python, idutils and vim.

Reference links (not complete list):

• gtags vimscript, uses Gnu global. updated 2008
• greputils vimscript, contains support for the *id idutils, 2005
• lid vimscript, Ancient, but this guy is pretty good, his tag and buffer howtos are amazing 2002
• An updated version of pyscope, 2010

Hopefully this helps you with your problem, I certainly helped me. I would have been quite sad tonight with a maggoty pycscope.

Answer 2

This seems to work for me:

Change to the top directory of your python code. Create a file called cscope.files:

find . -name '*.py' > cscope.files

cscope -R

You may need to perform a cscope -b first if the cross references don't get built properly.