Ctags help you navigate large or unfamiliar code bases. For example, they help you quickly jump to method definitions. Prior to using ctags, I would do the following:

  1. look at the method being called e.g. 'someobject.somemethod'
  2. do a project-wide search for 'some_method' to determine which file to open
  3. open that file
  4. if the file is large, search for the method again

I learned to do this relatively quickly and really got used to it. Ctags make this look ridiculous.

With ctags, I simply put my cursor on the method and press tt(custom vim binding) and that immediately opens up the correct file on the correct line.

This post covers how to get started with ctags and how to customize them a bit. Note: I'm going to focus on how to use ctags on a mac with vim. Other operating systems and editors should require similar steps.

Basics

If you have homebrew, installation is simple:

brew install ctags

In your console, navigate to a project and run this:

ctags -R --exclude=.git

That should create a tags file in the root of the project. Now, find a method call within the project and press Ctrl+] to jump to the first matching tag. Then, press Ctrl+t to go back.

If there are multiple matching tags you can go through them with :tnext and :tprevious.

Advanced Usage

These are some optimizations that make working with ctags much more streamlined for me.

Customize Vim

I find the default ctag commands a bit cumbersome to type so I use the following mappings in my .vimrc (including a mapping to regenerate the ctags when needed):

# manually, regenerate ctags
map <Leader>rt :!ctags --extra=+f -R *<CR><CR>

# main mapping, go to first matching tag
map tt <c-]>

# move forward and back through matching tags
map <c-b> :tprevious<CR>
map <c-n> :tnext<CR>

Automatically Generate Ctags with Git Hooks

Another thing you might want to avoid is having to manually update your ctags when the code changes over time.

Fortunately, there is a way to automate the generation of ctags with git hooks and Tim Pope outlines it in this blog post. The gist of it is that you setup git hooks to automatically regenerate ctags in a background process after you do stuff like a git pull, merge, commit, or rebase.

Further Reading