Vim/ctags/cscope tips

Inserting Escape (^[) character

Ctrl - v - [

Searching for C string constants in Vim

A simple, but incomplete, regular expression for C string constant is

\"[^"]*\"

It is incomplete because it can't handle '' \" '' in the string. Shown below is more refined version.

\"\([^"]*\\\"\)*[^"]*\"

For example, to find all C string and embrace them with S_S(), e.g., "Hello\n" to S_S("Hello\n"),

:1,$s/\"\([^"]*\\\"\)*[^"]*\"/S_S(&)/gc

Inversely, to remove the S_S() annotations,

:1,$s/S_S(\(\"\([^"]*\\\"\)*[^"]*\"\))/\1/gc

Generating ctags tag for Linux kernel

$ ctags -R --exclude=arch/powerpc --exclude=arch/ia64
                --exclude=include/asm-powerpc --exclude=include/asm-ia64

To use tags when in a sub directory, add the line below to .vimrc:

set tags=./tags, ./../tags., ./../../tags, ./../../../tags, ./../../../../tags

Using cscope with Vim

To generate a cscope database, in the source root directory execute

$ cscope -Rbkq

, where -R is to mean recursive, -b is to just build the database, -q is to create ''inverted index'', and -k is to indicate kernel mode so that no files in /usr/include is followed.

This command will create cscope.in.out, cscope.out, and cscope.po.out files in the source root.

To update the database later, just execute

$ cscope -U

" cs " is the Vim command for cscope operations. To add a cscope db,

: cs add path/to/cscope.out