Semantically grepping Emacs Lisp sources?

Semantically grepping Emacs Lisp sources?

[Tim Landscheidt]

Hi,

from time to time, I'm looking for examples on how to solve
some problem in Emacs Lisp.  I have a Git checkout of Emacs
and ELPA, i. e. "good" code en masse.

So suppose I'm interested in actual uses of define-skeleton
or insert-skeleton where the skeleton's interactor is not a
string, or the skeleton contains some invocation of
completing-read; this is quite hard (and theoretically im-
possible) to turn into a regular expression.

In similar cases in the past, I have sometimes built ad-hoc
greps with directory-files, find-file-noselect and read, but
this is definitely overkill for just browsing around.

Is there a utility either integrated in Emacs or external
that instead of a regular expression accepts some form of
"predicate" and then highlights all Lisp structures that
match it?  I. e., something like (pseudo-code) "(and (eql
(car s) 'define-skeleton) (not (string-p (whatever s))))"?

TIA,
Tim

Re: Semantically grepping Emacs Lisp sources?

[Noam Postavsky]

On Sat, 29 Jun 2019 at 18:02, Tim Landscheidt <tim@tim-landscheidt.de> wrote:

> Is there a utility either integrated in Emacs or external
> that instead of a regular expression accepts some form of
> "predicate" and then highlights all Lisp structures that
> match it?  I. e., something like (pseudo-code) "(and (eql
> (car s) 'define-skeleton) (not (string-p (whatever s))))"?

I think el-search in GNU ELPA does something like this.

https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/el-search.html

Re: Semantically grepping Emacs Lisp sources?

[Michael Heerdegen]

Noam Postavsky <npostavs@gmail.com> writes:

> I think el-search in GNU ELPA does something like this.

Yes.  If you happen to try it and find bugs or you have problems getting
started please report back.

Michael.