This package provides GNU Global integration with xref, project, completion-at-point (capf) and imenu in emacs.

There are some other packages with their own approach and set of more complete/complex features, maps and functionalities; like ggtags, gtags.el, gxref, agtags and some others. They are listed with a brief description in: related sites.

This package let all the work to the EMACS tools available for such functionalities and avoids external dependencies. Unlike other packages; this module does not create extra special maps, bindings or menus, but just adds support to the mentioned features to use gtags/global as a backend when possible. We do special emphasis on minimalism, simplicity, efficiency and tramp support.

This package may be extended in the future with new features and to support other tools, but only if they are required and included in an emacs distribution and don't need external dependencies.

Just load and enable the mode: gtags-mode or call it in a hook as usual. The mode is a global-minor-mode.

With use-packages

(use-package gtags-mode
  :hook ((emacs-startup . gtags-mode)))

or simply

(unless (fboundp 'gtags-mode)
	(autoload #'gtags-mode "gtags-mode" nil t))
(add-hook 'emacs-startup-hook #'gtags-mode)

There are only 3 extra commands that the user may need to know:

• gtags-mode : To enable the global minor mode.
• gtags-mode-create : To create a gtags database in case it doesn't exist for the current project.
• gtags-mode-update : To manually update an existent database; specially useful if the project has been modified outside emacs.

This packages tries to do its best to not require user configuration. The package provides a minimal set of configuration options in case the global/gtags executable are not in the usual locations, so the user can set them. gtags-mode-global-executable gtags-mode-gtags-executable are buffer local configuration options to set the path or names in case the user needs it or the user setup is do special that the command executable-find fails searching.

TRAMP users can use connection-local-variables to set these values per individual hosts or users if needed.

gtags-mode-features is the list of enabled features in gtags-mode. By default all the features: (project xref completion imenu hooks) are enabled. The user only needs to remove one of these entries and restart gtags-mode to disable it. TODO: Improve the custom type for this variable in order to restrict possible values.

The custom variable gtags-mode-lighter can be used to change the default mode-line message to use when the mode is enabled.

The verbosity of messages printed can be controlled with gtags-mode-verbose-level higher verbose level implies more messages and 0 prints no messages at all (not recommended!!). The most verbose messages are not printed in the echo area, but only in the \*Messages\* buffer.

It is possible to pass extra arguments to update commands using the variable gtags-mode-update-args. Usually these can be used to use different global backends. For example, to use exuberant-gtags instead of the default backend, the Arch Linux configuration is:

(setq gtags-mode-update-args "--gtagsconf=/usr/share/gtags/gtags.conf --gtagslabel=universal-ctags")

This variable can be set in the .dir-locals or as a connection-local-variable