Question

I am maintaining someone else’s code. The code is written in C using GCC 4.4.3 on Linux platform. However, the code jumps around a lot and its difficult to find out where all the functions are called from.

In Visual Studio, there is a feature called ‘Call Hierarchy’ which will display where functions are called from and called to. Does Emacs (23.1.1) have any such feature?

Answer 1

The classic Emacs way to jump to calls is to use TAGS file and use the M-. command. I recommend using Exuberant C Tags with the following command in the root directory of your project :

ctags -e --c-kinds=+pxd -R .

Then using visit-tags-table you can open the TAGS file. With M-. you can jump to each definition or call to your keyword. Use C-u M-. to jump to another occurrence. Use C-x z z z… to repeat the search.

If you have many projects, you can create a TAGS file for each one of them and then call visit-tags-file to add the TAGS file to your list of TAGS files to search from.

Another classic way (the un*x way), is to use the command M-x find-grep to search for occurrences of your keyword.