Re: etags to xref changed navigation

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Phillip Susi <phill@thesusis.net>
> Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2024 11:11:10 -0400
> 
> Etags used to work by hitting ( I think it was ) M-. to find the first
> reference, then M-, to cycle through the remaining references.  It seems
> that when it was replaced with xref, the M-, binding was removed, and
> now M-. opens an xref buffer ( splitting the window ) listing all of the
> references, and you have to navigate that buffer in one window while
> viewing each location in another.
> 
> I find this process slow and cumbersome compared to the old way of just
> jumping from reference to reference.  Is there a way to get back to the
> old behavior?

The old behavior is supposed to be necessary much less with xref,
since xref's search is more accurate, and usually finds only one
candidate.  So I'd be interested to know in what programming language
do you see many candidates, and why.

In addition, you haven't explained why you find the navigation in the
XREF buffer slow and cumbersome.  Basically, once you switch to the
XREF buffer, you can display next/previous candidate with a single
key, which is not more typing than "M-," (and there's the ability to
select a candidate that is not next or previous, something "M-,"
couldn't give you).  In addition, you can customize the variable
xref-auto-jump-to-first-definition to the value 'move' or 'show', in
which case the first candidate will be shown even if there are several
candidates.

Given all these facts, I'd be interested to hear why you consider the
new operation inferior to the old one.

If you still want to have the old behavior back, you can rebind M-. to
find-tag and M-, to tags-loop-continue, which still exist, just
without the default key binding.