CEDET can Analyze where symbols are referenced in your code base. The Symbol References tool in CEDET can use external tools such as GNU Global, ID Utils, CScope, or even find/grep to locate usages of your symbols. Every location is analyzed and displayed hierarchically showing you the file and function the reference occurs in, instead of a flat list of locations.

The image to the right shows integration with GNU Global running in the GNU Global source code.

How it works

The symbol reference tool is based on the Semantic module in CEDET. Semantic is a tool that starts with lexical and syntactic analysis and builds up to a symbol referencing engine called semantic-symref.

Semantic does not, however, analyze all your code and build indexes of every symbol used. This is a task not appropriate for an Emacs Lisp program. Instead, external tools are utilized that can do that indexing more quickly.

Tools supported by semantic-symref include GNU Global, ID Utils, CScope, and a combination of find/grep.

Unlike the raw interface to these tools, semantic-symref takes the output, and builds an output buffer that sorts the hits first by file, then by tag-name. Thus, you can quickly identify where the symbols are being used without having to visit each hit yourself.

There are two interfaces to semantic-symref. The first is:

M-x semantic-symref RET

This will search for usages of the symbol the cursor is currently in. The second interface is:

M-x semantic-symref-symbol RET

This command will prompt for the symbol to search for.