Jump to next instance of variable

[evandavis]

Would it be possible to add a method I could bind to a key to jump between occurrences of a variable? In this discussion on the LSP package there is a suggestion to hook into the textDocument/documentHighlight set to allow navigation between occurrences; could something like that work in eglot?

I understand I can mostly do this using isearch-forward-symbol-at-point, but that will match other stuff if the token happens to be a substring of another token.

I'd also be happy implementing this outside the package if someone could show me how :) but a quick keybinding to go from an import line to "where exactly is this used?" seems like something more people might find useful. Thanks for your consideration!

[joaotavora]

I don't have time to give you more advice than: look in the source code. Seems like a good idea anyway 👍 , and textDocument/documentHightlight seems reasonable.

[nemethf]

I think M-? collects the requested occurrences for some LSP backends, then next-error and previous-error can be used to navigate among the results. If this is not enough, you can customize xref-show-definitions-function and friends to your own function.

However, sometimes navigating among the instances of a variable is not useful enough. See this feature request: rust-lang/rust-analyzer#16365

[nemethf]

But next-error and previous-error are already bound to M-g n and M-g p.

[joaotavora]

I guess @evandavis wants something quicker that doesn't require an explicit xref-find-references call and piggy backs on the existing highlights of textDocument/documentHighlight

[evandavis]

@nemethf xref-find-references opens an xref buffer with references across the project and also loses which specific occurrence was at point at the time of call. So, like isearch-forward-symbol-at-point, it kinda works, but takes at a minimum two chords and in most cases takes manual intervention to make sure I'm landing on the right thing.

What I'm looking for is a single chord for each of previous/next, maybe M-g j and M-g k, to take me immediately to the previous/next occurrence of the symbol at point.

[nemethf]

OK. I still think that everything is there in the xref realm. So someone can create the requested feature by implementing a xref-show-xrefs-function/xref-show-definitions-function.

[joaotavora]

@nemethf you're probably right. In fact, this feature (quick jump not requiring `xref-find-references) could be implemented more powerfully like that, perhaps even more robustly: no dependence on the highlight capability or funky synchronization wait-for-highlight issues. A tad less efficient, since the same info is being requested twice in some cases.

I say "probably" because it could be that xref-find-references which relies on textDocument/references doesn't return the same stuff that textDocument/documentHighlight returns. But that could happen either way.