Tag: clang

Vim: Creating .clang_complete using CMake

The clang_complete plugin for Vim offers superior code completion. If your project is anything but trivial, it will only do so if you provide a .clang_complete file with the right compilation arguments. The easy way to do so is by using the cc_args.py script that comes with it to record the options directly into the .clang_complete file. Usually, one does

make CXX='~/.vim/bin/cc_args.py clang++'

However, the makefile generated by CMake doesn’t support the CXX configuration.

The solution is to call CMake with the CXX environment variable set:

CXX="$HOME/.vim/bin/cc_args.py clang++" cmake ..
make

Note that this will create the .clang_complete file in the build directory (I’ve assumed an out-of-place build), so just copy the file over to Vim’s working directory so it can find it. You’ll need to re-run CMake again (without CXX) to disable re-creating the .clang_complete file each time.

While looking for this solution, I first tried solving it by setting the CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER variable in CMake. However, for some strange reason, it didn’t like it, saying that the compiler wasn’t found (it shuns command-line arguments given in the compiler command).

The more I use clang_complete, the more awesome I find it. It has its quirks, but nonetheless it’s much simpler and better than manually creating tag files for each library.

Updated 6/1/2014: When setting CXX, use $HOME instead of ~ (to fix issues with newer versions of CMake).

Bye Bye OmniCppComplete, Hello Clang Complete

For years OmniCppComplete has been the de facto standard for C++ completion in Vim. But as time progressed, I got more and more annoyed by its shortcomings. OmniCppComplete is based on tokenizing provided by ctags. The ctags parsing of C++ code is problematic; you can’t even run it on libstdc++ headers (you need to download modified headers). You want to use an external library? You’ll need to run ctags separately on each library. Not to mention its inability to deduce types of anything more than trivial code. The core of the problem is that OmniCppComplete isn’t a compiler, and you can’t expect something that isn’t a compiler to fully understand code. This is what makes Visual Studio’s IntelliSense so great: it uses the Visual C++ compiler for parsing. It isn’t making wild guesses at types or what the current scope is – it knows it.
Continue reading Bye Bye OmniCppComplete, Hello Clang Complete