Customizing the display - ECB - the Emacs Code Browser
Description: ECB - the Emacs Code Browser

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#### 6.6.3 Customizing the display of the Methods-buffer

The ECB-Methods buffer is probably the most important browsing window offered by ECB. It displays all parsing informations of the current source-buffer (the buffer displayed in the current active edit-window).

Normally ECB gets all informations displayed in this Methods-buffer from the semantic-library - at least for semantic-sources. This library parses auto. the current source-buffer in the edit-window of ECB and returns all information in form of tags to ECB which displays them in a browse-able form in its Method-buffer. See ECB Methods-window for information how to use the Methods-buffer.

There are several options to customize which tags ECB should display in general, if the tags should be collapsed or expanded, how to fontify them (i.e. syntax-highlighting) and something more.

`ecb-show-tags`
  With the option `ecb-show-tags` you specify how ECB should display the tags returned by the semantic parser. Semantic divides its tags in several so called tag classes. A tag-class is always a symbol and can be for example `type` (tags which represent a class1, a interface, an enumeration etc.), `function` (tags which represent function or methods), `variable` (variables and attributes), `include` (import-statements) etc. There is no predefined superset of allowed tag-class-symbols because each language-parser can define its own tag-classes. But to get an overview of the most common tag-classes see the default value of the option `ecb-show-tags`.

  With the option `ecb-show-tags` you can now specify how ECB should display tags of a certain tag-class in a certain major-mode. You can tell ECB that all tags of a tag-class `X` should be displayed in an expanded bucket and all tags of a tag-class `Y` should be displayed in a collapsed bucket and all tags of a tag-class `Z` should be displayed flattened (means not contained in a expandable/collapsable bucket-node). These settings can be made separately for each major-mode but you can also define a default-display which takes effect when for a major-mode no special setting can be found in `ecb-show-tags`.

  For every tag-class you can tell ECB how the tags should be sorted.

`ecb-font-lock-tags`
`ecb-type-tag-display`
  How to fontify the tags in the Method-buffer
`ecb-tag-display-function`
  ECB and semantic offer several predefined functions for displaying the tags. Here you can customize, what informations tags should contain (only the method-name or the whole signature or something else) and what notation should be used, e.g. UML or not.

These are the most important options for this topic but it is recommended to have a look into the customize-group `ecb-methods` (see ecb-methods) and check all the options offered there!

All these options are only relevant for semantic-sources and take no effect for non-semantic-sources!

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#### Footnotes

[1] Do not confuse the term “class” in the context of a tag, which means the class of the tag and which is a semantic-term and a “class” in the context of an object oriented language like Java or C++! Normally the surrounding context sould be sufficient to understand which type of “class” is meant whenever the term “class” is used in this manual.