I use the Atom Editor on Linux. Arch Linux specifically. Atom has a nice feature of ctrl-R to view the symbols in the current file. This makes it easy to jump to a function or declaration in the current file.

For the past while, it’s been broken for me. I decided it was time to dig in and solve it.

I learned that ctags is now required to be provided by the system. This blog post helped identify that and offers some great tips! It references this SO answer too.

For my Arch Linux install, I installed ctags.

$ sudo pacman -S ctags

Yay! Now running ctrl-R on a file parses and shows the symbols/functions in the file. This was particularly a problem for me with Elixir source files.

However, the ctrl-shift-R for project-wide searching comes up empty.

The same blog post shows how to have the ctags rebuilt for the project on checkout of a different branch. (Using githooks).

Mystery solved. Phew!