z3c.recipe.tag

Contents

Introduction
Dependencies
How to use this recipe
Additional Resources

Introduction

This recipe generates a TAGS database file that can be used with a number of different editors to quickly look up class and function definitions in your package's source files and egg dependencies.

Dependencies

Before running a tags enabled buildout, you must install the appropriate command line tag generation tools: exuberant-ctags and id-utils. In Ubuntu, you can install these with apt-get:

$ sudo apt-get install exuberant-ctags id-utils

On a Mac, download and install port from http://www.macports.org/ and then install ctags and idutils in this way:

$ sudo port install ctags idutils

How to use this recipe

With Buildout

Suppose you have an egg called MyApplication. To use this recipe with buildout, you would add the following to the buildout.cfg file:

[tags]
recipe = z3c.recipe.tag
eggs = MyApplication

This produces a script file in the bin/ directory which you can then run like this:

$ ./bin/tags

By default, this script produces three files in the directory from which you ran the script:

a ctags file called TAGS for use by emacs,
a ctags file called tags for use by vi, and
an idutils file called ID for use by id-utils (gid, lid).

You can then use these files in your editor of choice.

Optionally, you can select which files to build. The following is the output of ./bin/tags --help:

usage: build_tags [options]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -l LANGUAGES, --languages=LANGUAGES
                        ctags comma-separated list of languages. defaults to
                        ``-JavaScript``
  -e, --ctags-emacs     flag to build emacs ctags ``TAGS`` file
  -v, --ctags-vi        flag to build vi ctags ``tags`` file
  -b, --ctags-bbedit    flag to build bbedit ctags ``tags`` file
  -i, --idutils         flag to build idutils ``ID`` file

If you'd like to set command line options by default (e.g. to limit building to ctags-vi by default) you can pass the default option in your buildout.cfg:

[tags]
recipe = z3c.recipe.tag
eggs = MyApplication
default = ['-v']

With virtualenv

You can use this with virtualenv too:

my_venv/bin/pip install z3c.recipe.tag
my_venv/bin/build_tags

this will build a tags file for all the packages installed in that virtualenv.

With Paver

If you are using Paver and already have z3c.recipe.tag installed, then all you have to do is add this line to your pavement.py file:

import z3c.recipe.tag

And then run the z3c.recipe.tag.tags task from the command line:

$ paver z3c.recipe.tag.tags

Additional Resources

For additional information on using tags tables with different editors see the following websites:

Emacs: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Tags.html
- to jump to the location of a tag, type M-x find-tag and the name of the tag. Or use M-. to jump to the tag matching the token the cursor is currently on. The first time you do this, you will be prompted for the location of the TAGS file.
VIM: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/tagsrch.html
BBEdit: http://pine.barebones.com/manual/BBEdit_9_User_Manual.pdf Chapter 14, page 324

For more information on ctags, visit http://ctags.sourceforge.net/

(BBEdit is a Macintosh text editor.)

For more information about GNU id-utils (basically a local text indexing/search engine; think of it as a very fast version of grep -w), see the id-utils manual.