Clink — a modern re-implementation of Cscope

When working in a large, complex C/C++ code base, an invaluable navigation tool is Cscope_. However, Cscope is showing its age and has some issues that prevent it from being the perfect assistant. Clink aims to be bring the Cscope experience into the twenty first century.

What does that mean?

• Full C/C++ semantic support – Clink uses libclang, which means it understands your code (including macros) as well as your compiler does.
• Multicore support – Parsing multiple, independent files trivially parallelises, so why be limited by one core?
• Assembly, MSVC DEFs, Python support – Your code base is more than just C and C++. Clink parses some other formats fuzzily and can maintain a call graph across language boundaries.
• Syntax highlighting – You’re probably used to looking at code in Vim with syntax highlighting, so Clink can ask Vim to highlight the snippets it shows you.
• UTF-8 – Ever wanted to search #include of a header whose path contains non-ASCII characters? Now you can.
• Exact jumps – Clink opens Vim not only at the right line, but at the right column for the entry you’ve asked for.
• Regex - Can’t remember the exact name of a symbol? Want to search for multiple similar symbols at once? Clink supports extended regex in all search fields.
• Fewer features – Cscope’s options to find files and regex text are now better served by any number of other tools__ and are not included in Clink.

Building Clink

.. code-block:: sh

download Clink

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/Smattr/clink cd clink

configure and compile

cmake -B build cmake --build build

Notes for devs

• The on-disk database format is extremely bloated. As with performance, I have put no effort into optimising this yet and easy wins abound.
• Vim integration is currently hard coded. I didn’t make this parametric or implement any abstraction for this because Vim is my unabashed weapon of choice. If you want support for another editor, please ask me and I’ll probably do it.
• Cscope’s “find assignments to this symbol” is not implemented. Honestly, I have never used this query. Have you? It actually sounds really useful, but I have never once thought of this until enumerating Cscope’s options while implementing Clink.

• Some open questions about Cscope that I haven’t yet explored:

  • Why do Cscope’s line-oriented and curses interface results differ? The example I have on hand is a file that #includes a file from a parent directory. If I had to speculate, I’d say this is actually a Cscope bug. The discrepancy seems to lead to a worse user experience in Cscope (file jumping in Vim that doesn’t work) though admittedly I’ve never actually noticed this until staring at Cscope results while implementing Clink.

Anything else you don’t understand, ask away. Questions are the only way I learned enough to write this thing.

Legal

Everything in this repository is in the public domain, under the terms of the Unlicense. For the full text, see LICENSE_.

.. _Cscope: http://cscope.sourceforge.net/ http://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/ http://geoff.greer.fm/ag/ http://beyondgrep.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep __ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sed .. _LICENSE: ./LICENSE