Speedbar is an Emacs Lisp program which allows you to create a special skinny frame with a specialized directory listing in it. This listing will have both directories and filtered files in it. You can then load files into your emacs frame, or expand the files to display all the tags that are in them and jump to those tags. You can also expand multiple directories into your speedbar frame.

Using Shift with the mouse is considered a "power click" which will ignore any cached data that might be related to the navigation desired. When loading a file, a power click will pull that file into a new frame.

For PC users with two button mice, a button1 double click acts as the mouse-2 click most emacs users are familiar with.

Additional keyboard commands are available for friendly file IO functions such as Rename/Copy/Delete, Loading lisp files, and compiling lisp files.

Different Modes for Speedbar

Speedbar is more than just file browsing, however. Speedbar is a generalized browser. Speedbar supports:

• multiple tagging methods for files (such as etags, imenu, and semantic)
• multiple major display modes (such as buffer lists, project lists, and EIEIO class browsing,)
• multiple minor display modes that appear when you view special files, such as Info pages, or read mail with RMAIL.

Starting with Speedbar 0.11, images are now supported to represent files and tags. This screen shot was taken using Emacs 21, using Semantic for tag generation. Any version of XEmacs should generate a similar picture.

Speedbar works with Emacs 19.3x, 20.x without images, and 21.x with images on platforms for which image display is available. It also works with images for XEmacs 20.x, and 21.x.

You can read the html documentation created from the texinfo file.

Speedbar is a standard part of Emacs and XEmacs. The CEDET version and the version in Emacs diverge over time, and occasionally synchronize.

There are several speedbar enabled tools that you can download which may not come with your installed Emacs distribution.

• EIEIO can use speedbar to display class hierarchies. It also has a specialized class set to make building custom speedbar displays easy.
• Semantic has a tagging mechanism that plugs into speedbar. It also has two major display modes for displaying class hierarchies, and context analysis.
• EDE uses the EIEIO classes to display project status.
• VHDL mode has a very fancy class browser for VHDL files.
• XSLT-process for Emacs provides XSLT file browsing.
• MH-E displays mail folders and message counts.
• XSlide uses imenu to display tags from XSL stylesheets.
• Palm Resource source files mode.
• Palm DataBase source files mode.
• EIRC has a speedbar display mode for showing servers and channels.
• ELDO & SPICE modes support speedbar tagging through imenu and speedbar configurations.
• Check the exuberant ctags FAQ to use that tool with speedbar.
• IDLWave mode supports speedbar tagging.
• Ada mode has had issues displaying files in speedbar which were fixed.
• php-mode supports speedbar tagging.
• EASE analysis mode for emacs.
• CIOMO - CoBOL mode supports imenu and speedbar.

If you know of others, let me know and I'll add a link.