Universal Ctags generates an index (or tag) file of language objects found in source files for many popular programming languages. This index makes it easy for text editors and other tools to locate the indexed items. Universal Ctags improves on traditional ctags because of its multilanguage support, its ability for the user to define new languages searched by regular expressions, and its ability to generate emacs-style TAGS files.
universal-ctags has the objective of continuing the development from what existed in the Sourceforge area. Github exuberant-ctags repository was started by Reza Jelveh and was later moved to the universal-ctags organization.
The goal of the project is preparing and maintaining common/unified working space where people interested in making ctags better can work together.
If you want to try the latest universal-ctags without building it yourself...
Daily builds are available at the ctags-win32 project. Go to the releases page to download zip packages.
See Homebrew Tap for Universal Ctags
Go to ctags-snap and
clone the ctags-snap
repo. Then, follow instructions to build the
snap package of ctags. Snapcraft will automatically fetch the source
code from GitHub.
To build with Autotools (Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool) on GNU/Linux, OSX, or Windows 10 WSL,
$ git clone https://github.com/universal-ctags/ctags.git
$ cd ctags
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure --prefix=/where/you/want # defaults to /usr/local
$ make
$ make install # may require extra privileges depending on where to install
See
docs/autotools.rst
for more information.
To build on Windows, see
docs/windows.rst
for more information.
To build on OSX, see
docs/osx.rst
for more information.
Go to https://docs.ctags.io for the preformatted documentations
of the latest development version.
See also */README.md
on this repository.
You may be interested in how universal-ctags is different from exuberant-ctags. See Introduced changes on https://docs.ctags.io/ for details.
The most significant incompatible changes:
-
Universal-ctags doesn't load
~/.ctags
and./.ctags
at starting up time. Instead, it loads~/.ctags.d/*.ctags
and./.ctags.d/*.ctags
. See the above web site and man pages (man/ctags.1.rst.in and man/ctags-incompatibilities.7.in in the source tree). -
Universal-ctags is more strict about characters that can be used in kind letters and kind names than Exuberant-ctags.
-
The letter must be an alphabetical character (
[a-zA-EG-Z]
).F
is reserved forfile
kind. -
The first character of the name must be alphabetic, and the rest characters must be alphanumeric (
[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9]*
).
See the web site and man pages. The detailed background is explained in #1737.
If you want to reuse your .ctags written for Exuberant-ctags, you must review kind letters and names defined with
--regex-<LANG>=...
options. When updating the definitions, using--kinddef-<LANG>=...
option is appreciated. -
Pull-requests are welcome!