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Hover at Cursor

Alexander Liberov edited this page Oct 5, 2026 · 2 revisions

Hover at Cursor

Shows a hover card for the symbol under the editor caret: signature, documentation, and callers. Reach for it to check what a symbol is and how it is used without leaving the line you are on.

Reaching it in the IDE

drag-lint > Hover at Cursor

Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+Alt+H.

Running it from the CLI

In the IDE this action is served in-process (the feature map's Mechanism column marks it "in-process") -- no exe is spawned per hover. The same capability is also exposed as a standalone CLI verb, and over stdio by the bundled language server (the Features page lists hover among the methods drag-lint lsp implements):

drag-lint hover --qname <Foo.Bar> [--db <file.sqlite>] [--format plain|md|json]

--qname is the fully qualified symbol; --format selects plain text, markdown, or JSON.

What the card says about effects

A routine the purity analysis PROVED changes nothing outside its own locals carries the analysis fact Effect-free (proven). The JSON form (hover --format json) carries the verdict for every routine as effect_free (1 / 0), effect_summary (tokens: g globals, h heap, s own fields, p<k> parameter k, ? not analysable) and effect_witness (the first effect in words, e.g. writes through parameter #1 (AReason)). Every token, and the difference between an empty summary and a missing one, is spelled out in the Effect Summary Legend. Older builds printed Pure; that word is no longer emitted. For the same data as a chart, see ask effects.

Hovering a forward declaration (TFoo = class;) shows the REAL declaration, led by forward declaration -> line N.

What it needs

The --db flag is optional -- drag-lint auto-resolves the index when omitted. An index must still exist. In the IDE, it also needs an open editor with the caret on a symbol.

Example

Illustrative only:

drag-lint hover --qname CustomerOrder.TCustomerOrder.Total --db C:\Projects\MyApp\_D-RAG\MyApp.sqlite --format md

This would print the hover card for the Total member of TCustomerOrder as markdown.

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