| Home URL: | https://github.com/pierre-rouleau/pel |
|---|---|
| Project: | PEL -- Pragmatic Emacs Library |
| Created: | Wednesday, June 5 2024. |
| Author: | Pierre Rouleau <[email protected]> |
| Modified: | 2025-03-01 21:25:09 EST, updated by Pierre Rouleau. |
| Copyright: | © 2024, 2025, Pierre Rouleau |
Reference: Ctags @ Wikipedia
The first version of the ctags program appeared in the early 90's. Other implementation appeared over time as shown here:
- BSD Unix 3.0 Ctags (1992)
- FreeBSD CTags
- Exuberant Ctags, created and maintained by Darren Hiebert until 2009 for
version 5.8. Has support for 41 programming languages.
- Universal Ctags, a fork of Exuberant CTags, is still maintained on the GitHub universal-ctags repo. See Universal Ctags Manual . This supports a large set of file types. Version 6.1.0 built at the end of May 2024 reports supporting 156 of them.
- Emacs etags and ctags
- etags generates a Emacs-style TAGS file.
- ctags generates a vi-style TAGS file.
Emacs has its own program, etags which generates a format that Emacs understand. Emacs also provides a version of ctags that generates the vi-style format used elsewhere.
Also see the 🚦 Xref-Support PDF.
The PEL project provides a set of file finding and TAGS creation tools that use etags. Some of them will also use the Universal Ctags program when the ETAGS_USE_UCTAGS environment variable is set to 1 or the absolute path of Universal Ctags executable file to force using Universal Ctags. When setting it to 1, the ctags found in PATH is expected to be Universal Ctags.
This includes the following utilities that Build a Emacs-compliant TAGS for specific programming language sets for the source code files in specified directory tree(s).
| Utility | Programming Language |
|---|---|
| etags-c | C and C++ |
| etags-el | Emacs Lisp and C |
| etags-erl | Erlang and C |
| etags-go | Go |
| etags-lisp | Common Lisp |
| etags-py | Python |
| etags-rs | Rust |
There's also a set of etags builder for build tool files:
| Utility | Build Tool Language |
|---|---|
| etags-autotools | GNU Autotools files (which includes GNU Makefiles). |
| etags-make | GNU Makefiles only. |
Each of these utilities support a command line with the [-h|--help]
options and print more information.
You can install symbolic links to the files inside the PEL bin directory by executing the pel/bin/setup/install-etags-builders.sh script from any POSIX compliant shell.