vim-gutentags VS vim-mundo

https://github.com/ludovicchabant/vim-gutentags/issues/139 has some background.

Hi everyone. I'm looking to have a better setup for Rust in neovim. I do have rust-analyzer installed for useful lsp things but I was hoping to get tags working for it as well. I was using vim-gutentags (https://github.com/ludovicchabant/vim-gutentags) for navigating useful functions and stuff but couldn't quite get it to work for rust. Is there a simple way to do it or do I need rusty-tags and some aucommand to get it to work?

use tags, I like https://github.com/ludovicchabant/vim-gutentags for this. I might use my local .vimrc to tweak the config (exclude compiled source files and other uninteresting things)

guttentag: https://github.com/ludovicchabant/vim-gutentags

Without more information, it's hard to point you in the right direction. The tags file could be out-of-date, in which case you can try to re-generate it (vim-gutentags for tags auto-generation). You could have 2 function declarations with the same name, in which case you can try :tag to cycle through tags (supports partials, like :tag F which will suggest FOO, FAR, FAB ...etc) or :tag to see a list of possible options (supports partials, like :tag F which will list FOO, FAR, FAB, ...etc) for various matching tags you can jump to (fzf.vim provides a tags fuzzy finder via :Tags). Maybe you're experiencing :h tag-priority?

ludovicchabant/vim-gutentags - Tags

You can then use :cnext and :cprev (or focusing the window and selecting an entry) to navigate between them.

As others have stated, you can also use ctags (plugins like https://github.com/ludovicchabant/vim-gutentags are useful for refreshing tags in a project), but for some languages you may need to add a tag definition (e.g. for something like rust or zig). For older languages like C you should be fine.

Not sure if it will help in this case, but I also depend on ctags for when the lsp fails (e.g. code it doesn't compile for some reason). Here you let a program create a tags file, e.g. I use https://github.com/universal-ctags/ctags (it seems it can parse json files, though I'm not sure what kind of tags are generated from this and if they will be useful to you) with https://github.com/ludovicchabant/vim-gutentags to update the tags file. The tags file just contains symbol names with locations where they are defined, and vim has builtin functionality to use these tags files :h tag and they (can) work filetype independent. For example if I mention a C type in a markdown document I can just use ctrl-[ to jump to its definition in the C source file. Possibly you can generate tags files yourself from the json files to help with this, the tags file format is not very complicated. Tags also are not very intelligent and depend on unique names for them to work well, there is the :h g_CTRL-] that can help, but for symbols that are very common (e.g. init or something that potentially has like 20+ definitions) it doesn't really work.

there's also telescope-undo and vim-mundo

I don't always need it, but when I do I find vim-mundo incredibly helpful. Understanding the vim undotree is hard without a visualization and mundo's ability to search my undo chunks makes it easy to revive some previous change that wasn't committed to version control.

Still using mundo here (https://github.com/simnalamburt/vim-mundo)

You mean undo/redo? that's u and . To view undos visually you can use a plugin like [vim-mundo](https://github.com/simnalamburt/vim-mundo

I'm glad you found something that works for you, and I don't mean to dissuade you even if I could, but to me that feels like an antipattern if you only use it for typed text.

Consider that with a text editor like Vim, for example, you can "time travel" [0] through your file's edits, or even have undo branches/trees [1][2] available per file. That saves you the trouble of having to transcribe text from screenshots, and also barely uses any storage space.

Plain text is also highly more portable and more likely to be recoverable in case of drive failure or file corruption.

Additionally, or alternatively, you could try any sort of manual versioning system or background automatic backup solution that keeps versions of files as you work on them.

[0]: https://vimtricks.com/p/vimtrick-time-travel-in-vim/

[1]: https://neovim.io/doc/user/undo.html#undo-tree

[2]: https://github.com/simnalamburt/vim-mundo

mundo undo tree

It's not just minutes either, you can do seconds with s, hours with h, days with d and get this - "writes" with w. You can also just simply go back to an arbitrary n number of buffer states before; but just like writes, that's hard to keep track of mentally and instead you should probably use a proper plugin for that.

I used to use Typora before I got into Neovim and realised that it wasn't free software either. Now I'm quite satisfied with my current setup, which uses: - aerial.nvim for header outline and navigation - run-code.nvim for running code blocks - vim-mundo for persistent undo history traversal (like Mac's time machine) - Prettier for auto-formatting Markdown as well as code blocks to their respective languages

Using a plugin like undotree (or Gundo, or Mundo) to visualize the edit history is by far the most practical solution to OP's problem, and I'm shocked you're the only person to suggest it.

There's a fork called mundo which has an inline diff mode that I'm a big fan of — https://github.com/simnalamburt/vim-mundo