SIsigna11·Sep 24, 2026
emacs has dumb-jump https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump exactly for this, and is often good enough. it uses ripgrep (or some such) for faster-than-grep queries.
In Why building a Rust LSP is hardjacktasia
dumb-jump
Emacs Lisp2016–2026
jacktasia / dumb-jump
dumb-jump
an Emacs "jump to definition" package for 60+ languages
11Distinct people
15Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.8KGitHub stars
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What it is
an Emacs "jump to definition" package for 60+ languages
GitHub
Where it is used
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
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HN mentions by year15 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-03-23 20:24:00 UTC to 2026-09-24 08:59:30 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
15 sourcesI have been using https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump to quickly jump to definitions. LSP is hit or miss; in some languages, it works great, while in others, the implementation is not so good. I have been thinking about a middle ground based on Tree-sitter. GitHub uses Tree-sitter to power code navigation, but unfortunately, I can't find anything good that I can use offline. Why is there no ctags equivalent powered by Tree-sitter?
In The Future of SCIPHave you tried any plugins using ripgrep? Searching for expressions in Neovim is pretty much instant using fzf-lua or any-jump, the latter is based on the emacs package https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump
In Lem: Emacs-like editor written in Common LispI don't really have any trouble using Emacs on the "modern" C++ codebases that I'm working on. I've tried lsp-mode and eglot with clangd but found that really all I need is a little bit of elisp to call clang-format, dumb-jump (<https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump>) to jump to definition, and project-compile to build the project and collect warnings/errors into a buffer.
In My goal of closing 10% of Emacs bugs (2020)> 2. No language server (apparently it's just impossible due to the way the language works). Tbh, I'd be happy with just "Go to definition" but alas, no-can-do!
Emacs' dumb-jump appears to have some basic support for go to definition: https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump/blob/master/dumb-jump...
But out of curiosity, what is the issue from a technical point of view?
In Crystal Programming LanguageWhile I have no idea about tags, I want to say that you may find something as simple as dumb-jump[1] does what you want most of the time.
[1] https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump
In Building an Intelligent EmacsI agree with your first point.
Learning elisp and becoming comfortable within the Emacs ecosystem is definitely a daunting task, but once you do learn elisp then modifying Emacs to how you want it to be is extremely easy.
Other editors require creating a plugin/extension that follows some sort of guidelines (or you can just modify the source code).
For example, here's VS Code's "Hello World" plugin anatomy: https://code.visualstudio.com/api/get-started/extension-anat...
They recommend a plugin to have several files and to have JSON to specify specifics of the extension.
Compared to emacs, all you really need to do is put (message "hello world") in your .emacs file.
Granted, it's not quite fair to compare Emacs and VS Code in this fashion. VS Code has a system in place for having an extension whereas Emacs treats your .emacs file as an ext
Read the rest
ension of itself. Part of Emacs is written in elisp, and when Emacs runs it runs the code in your .emacs file just like other elisp code (this statement is probably not entirely true, but it's just a simplified way of viewing it).
To be quite honest, I really wish all other text editors had something equivalent to Emacs .emacs file. If VS Code ran a js file on startup I'd be very happy.
Regarding this point:
> But the question is, if you already can code, then why bother with creating elisp-code or an vc code-extension? Today there is a good change that you already known some useful tooling-language.
You can take advantage of existing tooling for Emacs - you can actually get away with quite a lot in Emacs without knowing any elisp. The barrier to entry to try out code snippets from the internet is extremely low - all you need to do is copy-paste.
That being said, this is a double-edged sword. Once you start copy-pasting a ton of snippets there's a chance that things may conflict and break. You'll need to start learning how to use Emacs' debugging tools and you'll probably have to familiarize yourself with elisp.
In addition to that, the tooling depends on what other Emacs users have created - if you're trying to do something in Emacs that other Emacs users haven't worked with then you may need to learn elisp. The existing tooling for Emacs is quite great, I haven't found too many things that didn't have tooling, or if there wasn't any tooling, then there's something that is generic enough to work with what I'm trying to do.
Ex: company-mode (https://github.com/company-mode/company-mode) for auto complete can work for programming languages that do not have a company-mode backend, there's also dumb-jump for getting to definitions(https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump).
Emacs has dumb-jump, which is just... Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.
It doesn't perform any deep semantic analysis; it just abuses whatever existing grep-like tools you have and a bare minimum understanding of the language syntax to find likely correct definitions.
https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump
In Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)My package dumb-jump might be what you want:
https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump
In Emacs 26.3I recently discovered `dumb-jump`, and now use it all the time.
https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump
In A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015)You could give Dumb Jump a shot: https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump
In A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015)Sounds like you might be interested in my dumb-jump package: https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump
In 'Using Emacs' SeriesAnother tool that uses ag to look for tags (emacs): https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump
In Show HN: Tag – instantly jump to your ag matchesDumb-jump: an Emacs “jump to definition” package
131 points · Open discussionShow HN: Dumb Jump – a jump to definition package for Emacs
2 points · Open discussion