Which class or method or function am I in?

Question

When navigating a source file with incremental search, I often find myself jumping into some context that is taller than the window. This raises the question: "Which class am I in?". Or, if the previous developer is prone to writing tall methods: "Which class and method am I in?"

I currently answer these questions by interrupting my search to start a new regex search in the reverse direction, then cancel this search with C g, then do whatever (usually resume the search). But, this happens to me so often, I feel like I should have a single command to just print the class/method context in the minibuffer. Or, even better, if that context was always visible. (I would give up a line of window for that.)

Is there some Emacs gadget that already scratches this itch? Or, am I just going about this in completely the wrong way? If it matters, I happen to be working in Python and Java.

Answer 1

which-function-mode displays the current method name.

The following configuration, which I got from Emacs Redux, displays the current method / function / orgmode heading in the top header line rather than the mode line:

;; Show the current function name in the header line
(which-function-mode)
(setq-default header-line-format
              '((which-func-mode ("" which-func-format " "))))
(setq mode-line-misc-info
            ;; We remove Which Function Mode from the mode line, because it's mostly
            ;; invisible here anyway.
            (assq-delete-all 'which-func-mode mode-line-misc-info))

Do check the linked article for a complete explanation of which-function-mode.