Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 103

Configure Vim to Work with ctags

If we want to use Vim’s ctag navigation commands, we must ensure that the tags file is up-to-date and that Vim knows where to look for it.

Tell Vim Where to Find the Tags File

The ‘tags’ option specifies where Vim should look to find a tags file ('tags'ⓘ). When ./ is used in the ‘tags’ option, Vim replaces it with the path of the currently active file. We can inspect the defaults:

:set tags?
tags=./tags,tags

With these settings, Vim looks for a tags file in the directory of the current file and in the working directory. Under certain conditions, if a match is found in the first tags file, Vim won’t even look in the second file (see tags-optionⓘ for more details). Using Vim’s default settings, ...