Learning the vi Editor, Sixth Edition

8.5. Enhanced Tags

The "Exuberant ctags" program is a ctags clone that is considerably more capable than UNIX ctags. It produces an extended tags file format that makes tag searching and matching a more flexible and capable process. We describe it first, since it is supported by several of the vi clones.

This section also describes tag stacks: the ability to save multiple locations visited with the :tag or ^] commands. All of the clones provide tag stacking.

8.5.1. Exuberant ctags

The "Exuberant ctags" program was written by Darren Hiebert. Its home page is http://home.hiwaay.net/~darren/ctags/. As of this writing, the current version is 2.0.3. The following list of the program's features is adapted from the README file in the ctags distribution:

• It is capable of generating tags for all types of C and C++ language tags, including class names, macro definitions, enum names, enumerators (values inside an enumeration), function (method) definitions, function (method) prototypes/declarations, structure members and class data members, struct names, typedefs, union names and variables.

• It supports both C and C++ code.

• It is very robust in parsing code and is far less easily fooled by code containing #if preprocessor conditional constructs.

• It can be used to print out a human-readable list of selected objects found in source files.

• It supports generation of GNU emacs-style tag files (etags).

• It works on UNIX, QNX, MS-DOS, Windows 95/NT, OS/2, and the Amiga. Some precompiled binaries ...