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It would be great if some IDE offered the way to right mouse click when a function is called and have the immediate option to jump to the function when it is defined.

Is this possible in Javascript?

Maybe I've just been oblivious - is there a name for this technique?

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The Resharper plugin for Visual Studio has this feature. – Bringer128 Nov 7 '12 at 5:04
If i'm not mistaken this is possible in visual studio when you're debugging a website. It connects to the running IE and correlates the javascript being executed to the source code it served to IE. – Jimmy Hoffa Nov 7 '12 at 5:20
Check out Webstorm. Written by the same guys who made IntelliJ and ReSharper. But yeah, JS is highly mutable so it's best guess without run-time unless something happens to be declared within the same function scope. – Erik Reppen Jun 13 at 15:08

1 Answer

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This really is never going to be possible with JavaScript. Some IDE's do a "best guess", but it will never be perfect. Since JavaScript uses a dynamic type system, it is impossible to perform static analysis to determine what a symbol is bound to until runtime.

The closest thing to this would be in-browser debugging tools such as Firebug or chrome's developer tools, which do allow this feature at runtime.

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Also Firebug allows the user to evaluate a function in the console and clicking on it takes you to the definition. – pllee Nov 8 '12 at 16:52

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