In Emacs, how can I use imenu more sensibly with C#?

Question

I've used emacs for a long time, but I haven't been keeping up with a bunch of features. One of these is speedbar, which I just briefly investigated now. Another is imenu. Both of these were mentioned in in-emacs-how-can-i-jump-between-functions-in-the-current-file?

Using imenu, I can jump to particular methods in the module I'm working in. But there is a parse hierarchy that I have to negotiate before I get the option to choose (with autocomplete) the method name.

It goes like this. I type M-x imenu and then I get to choose Using or Types. The Using choice allows me to jump to any of the using statements at the top level of the C# file (something like imports statements in a Java module, for those of you who don't know C#). Not super helpful. I choose Types. Then I have to choose a namespace and a class, even though there is just one of each in the source module. At that point I can choose between variables, types, and methods. If I choose methods I finally get the list of methods to choose from. The hierarchy I traverse looks like this;

Using
Types
  Namespace
    Class
      Types
      Variables
      Methods
         method names

Only after I get to the 5th level do I get to select the thing I really want to jump to: a particular method.

Imenu seems intelligent about the source module, but kind of hard to use. Am I doing it wrong?

Answer 1

The CEDET tools at http://cedet.sf.net includes a C# parser in the 'contrib' area that can parse C# code. CEDET then supports specialized interfaces for both speedbar and imenu, that will shape your menu constructs in a way that code organized, not tag type organized. In c++, for example, code like this:

namespace foo {
   class bar {
       int somemethod();
   }
}

would give you a tree that had "bar" under "foo", and "somemethod" under "bar", so if you know your structure, you just need to unwind by name to the tag you want.