LinLog

Today's post is random Vim trivia, featuring ctags!

If you've used Vim casually or been around the UNIX world for a bit, you may have heard of ctags, but not really been sure what it was good for.  Well, ctags is a code indexing tool.  It scans a bunch of source code and creates an index of it.  The goal is the same as creating a  database index - to allow you to look up specific things quickly.

That's straight-forward enough, right?  But what the heck do you do with the index once you create it?  Well...nothing.  At least, not directly.  Sure, you can manually create and query the tag index from the command line, but you wouldn't really want to.  Following the UNIX way, ctags is really just one part of the pipeline.  It creates the index and it's your editor that queries it and does stuff with the result.

If you want to use Vim for any non-trivial development, then you really want to be using ctags.  It provides you with a handy way to jump between definitions of classes, functions, and so forth, much like you get with Visual Studio or PHPStorm.  It makes your life significantly easier.

The only problem is that there's a little setup that needs to be done.  Reading the ctags index doesn't require anything special if you're using the default "tags" files for the index.  However, generating that file takes a little more effort.  You can do it manually, but really you want it to happen automatically in the background.  Luckily, there's a plugin for that - Gutentags.  This plugin will basically just update your tags file in the background at appropriate intervals.  Although it has some options available, there's not really anything you need to configure for it - it just works out of the box.

Once you've got your tags file auto-updating, the next thing is to figure out how you want to browse tags.  The workflow that works best depends on your preferences, and I can't claim to have mastered it.  This page gives a good overview of the different commands and default keybindings that are available for tag browsing.  As with everything else in Vim, there are a lot of options available, but you can get by with just a few to start.  Personally, I find that just ctrl+] and :tselect work for 80% of my needs, but your mileage may vary.