Gutentags for Vim

Autotags is my second “official” Vim plugin (after Lawrencium). It confirms a trend of having a terrible name (although this time for different reasons), but I’m open to changing it since it’s still early. And as that terrible name implies, this new plugin is all about automatically managing your tags.

Edit: thanks to Reddit, it was renamed to Gutentags! I edited this post after this point to use the updated name and links.

One of the biggest problems you face when using Vim with a large codebase – and one of the reasons most users still go back to an IDE for their day job – is that tags files in Vim suck. No wait, it’s not even that they suck, it’s that there’s nothing out of the box to help you with it. Which, well, sucks.

In case you don’t know, tags files are basically a reverse index of the symbols defined in a given codebase, as generated by an external tool like Ctags. This is what lets you put the cursor on a function call and jump to the definition of that function. It’s basic stuff that “just works” in an IDE¹, but in Vim you need to create, update, and otherwise manage that thing yourself. It’s insanely archaic even by Vim’s standards.

But there’s no reason it shouldn’t “just work” in Vim, and that’s why I wrote Gutentags. Head over to the official website to get started in less than a minute.

In case you’re wondering how this plugin is different from the many other similar plugins out there, or from just doing it the retarded way (i.e. run !ctags -R . every now and then), here it is:

• No dependencies on anything else than Vim and Ctags: no Python, Ruby, or whatever.
• Cross-platform: should work at least on Mac and Windows at the moment, Linux should be fine too².
• Automatically index new projects: when you open a file in a new project, Gutentags will start indexing it right away. You don’t need to manually run it if you don’t want to.
• Incremental tags generation: when you edit and save a file, Gutentags will properly and automatically update the index, but only for that file. Re-generating the whole index obviously doesn’t scale for large codebases, yet that’s what most tutorials tell you to do! This is madness and it has to stop.
• Background update: you shouldn’t have to wait while the index is (re)generated (which is what !ctags -R . does! Again, madness).
• Keep tags files away: don’t like to see lots of tags files polluting your projects everywhere? Tired of adding tags to every .gitignore or .hgignore file ever? Me too. Gutentags lets you keep them in a hidden place of your own choosing.

At the time of writing this post, Gutentags has been tested on a glorious total of 3 machines (all my own with the same Vim configuration), so watch our for bugs, and please report them on Github or BitBucket.

The usual disclaimers are in effect (this is a random piece of code you found on someone’s blog!), but I just want to warn you that since this plugin kicks off background ctags processes, there could be bugs that will generate humongous tags files while saturating your laptop’s CPU and ending up burning your balls and/or snatch. Again, report them via Github/Bitbucket after calling your local emergency dispatch centre.