created by

Craig Emery

script type

utility

description

If you use ctags to make tags files of your source, it's nice to be able to re-run ctags on a source file when you save it. However, using ctags -a will only change existing entries in a tags file or add new ones. It doesn't delete entries that no longer exist. Should you delete an entity from your source file that's represented by an entry in a tags file, that entry will remain after calling ctags -a. This python function will do two things: 1) It will search for a tags file starting in the directory where your source file resides and moving up a directory at a time until it either finds one or runs out of directories to try. 2) Should it find a tags file, it will then delete all entries in said tags file referencing the source file you've just saved and then execute ctags -a on that source file using the relative path to the source file from the tags file. This way, every time you save a file, your tags file will be seamlessly updated.

install details

Simply source the file autoTag.vim from your .vimrc file. This utility will (obviously) only work when using vim that's been compiled with python support.

Click on the package to download.

package	script version	date	Vim version	user	release notes
autotag.vim	1.9	2009-07-30	6.0	Craig Emery	Minor change to support updating the taglist menu (for script #273) Thanks Nick.
autotag.vim	1.8	2009-06-30	6.0	Craig Emery	Tidied up the diag stuff, using *much* more meaningful variables. Fixed the empty default tags file name. Confirmed working in MacVim, other platforms not verified. :-$
autotag.vim	1.7	2009-01-29	7.0	Craig Emery	More backwards compatibility aimed at Python 2.3.
autotag.vim	1.6	2009-01-29	6.0	Craig Emery	Support Python older than 2.4.
autotag.vim	1.5	2008-12-09	6.0	Craig Emery	Improved support for Python 2.6 (with some help from Andreas Schneider: cheers!) by moving to Python 2.4 subprocess API.
autotag.vim	1.4	2007-06-18	6.0	Craig Emery	Changed the way the script prints messages. Now there's a run-time configurable verbosity level in the script. By default it's 0 (zero) so no messages are printed. I use level 1 (one) and get a nice quick message telling me which ctags file is being updated.
autotag.vim	1.3	2007-06-13	6.0	Craig Emery	Submission from Johan Segolsson added configuration of the ctags command name. Thanks Johan.
autotag.vim	1.2	2007-06-11	6.0	Craig Emery	1.1 would re-declare the Python class on every write. I've also made the information messages better. If you experience a pause during the update, the messages should now let you know where it's happening. :-)
autotag.vim	1.1	2005-10-11	6.0	Craig Emery	Fixed a couple of small issues: Files with spaces in their names / paths are now quoted before being given as arguments to ctags (though I plan to change this code from using os.popen to using os.execl so as to completely avoid these kinds of issues) If the tags file is found in \ (e.g. c:\) then I was making the relative path incorrectly. This is fixed. I've cleaned up the handling of '/' and '\' in paths (since tags files specify files with '/' but your OS may not)
autotag.vim	1.0	2005-09-02	6.0	Craig Emery	Initial upload