> What do you do if you need to look up the definition/implementation of some function which is in some other file?
Code search (ripgrep, GitHub search, Sourcegraph, git grep, or even just plain grep). You can use VS Code search but I prefer CLI tools so I can filter the output of my search with more searches—VS Code makes it hard to post-process/filter project-wide search results.
Filename search (fzf, fd, or just find).
There are cases where LSP-powered Go to Def is faster, but there are also cases where it’s less accurate. I’m talking:
- Untyped code in a graduate typed language
- References of a method name in a YAML file pulled out with reflection
- References of that method in a comment of some other method, where that method is actually the method I’m looking for.
- A one-to-one mapping of method names with some enum somewhere else, but lowercase in one spot, and all caps in the other spot.
So yes, sometimes go to def will be faster, but you’ll lose out on so many other possible references.
Another case: repos where the codebase is so large that the editor tooling is slow. Repos where I’m brand new to it, because I just need to check why some code in a third-party library is going haywire.
Grep (code search) is just so powerful.
I have a post about how to do large-scale code migrations/codemods. Everyone assumes the post is going to be about how to use high-powered, language-aware AST-based static analysis tooling. But half the post is talking about the unreasonable effectiveness of regular expressions.
Code search (ripgrep, GitHub search, Sourcegraph, git grep, or even just plain grep). You can use VS Code search but I prefer CLI tools so I can filter the output of my search with more searches—VS Code makes it hard to post-process/filter project-wide search results.
Filename search (fzf, fd, or just find).
There are cases where LSP-powered Go to Def is faster, but there are also cases where it’s less accurate. I’m talking:
- Untyped code in a graduate typed language
- References of a method name in a YAML file pulled out with reflection
- References of that method in a comment of some other method, where that method is actually the method I’m looking for.
- A one-to-one mapping of method names with some enum somewhere else, but lowercase in one spot, and all caps in the other spot.
So yes, sometimes go to def will be faster, but you’ll lose out on so many other possible references.
Another case: repos where the codebase is so large that the editor tooling is slow. Repos where I’m brand new to it, because I just need to check why some code in a third-party library is going haywire.
Grep (code search) is just so powerful.
I have a post about how to do large-scale code migrations/codemods. Everyone assumes the post is going to be about how to use high-powered, language-aware AST-based static analysis tooling. But half the post is talking about the unreasonable effectiveness of regular expressions.