It's Aliiiiive! Exuberant Ctags is Now Universal Ctags

by Daniel Convissor at 2015-12-23 11:15:00

Exuberant Ctags is a lovely, obscure tool developers use to index source code. Unfortunately, the project went dormant after 2009. Thankfully, Masatake Yamato resuscitated the project as Universal Ctags in 2014.

Since then there have been well over 1,000 commits from several significant contributors. There's even a pull request open at the moment to bring in support for PHP 7.

Before installing the shiny new ctags, one needs to expunge the existing installation. If you installed it from source, as discussed in an earlier blog post, "walk this way:"

cd <path to where you keep source code>/ctags
sudo make uninstall

But if you have it installed via a packge, here's one example of how to "put the candle back:"

sudo apt-get remove exuberant-ctags

"Give my creature liiiife!"

cd <path to where you keep source code>

git clone https://github.com/universal-ctags/ctags.git universal-ctags
cd universal-ctags

./autogen.sh
./configure
make

sudo make install

"Oh, sweet mystery of life at last I've found you..." From my quick examination, things are working perfectly with Effortless Ctags with Git and Ctags for SVN.

Tags: ctags

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