Autotags

A little tool that watches a given directory and generates ctags whenever you save your code.

Why?

Many editors and tools make use of ctags to provide a better coding experience. This is great. The only issue is that every time you add a class, function, variable, method, etc. you need to run ctags again so that your editor knows about your new code. Autotags solves that issue by keeping an eye on your files and then running ctags for you when anything changes.

Install

Debian & Ubuntu family

TODO

Fedora & Redhat family

TODO

Arch Linux

Autotags is available in AUR (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/autotags/). You can install it using your favorite AUR helper.

$ aurhelper -S autotags

Other Linux distributions

1. Install ctags
2. Install inotify-tools
3. Download autotags somewhere in your $PATH

Mac or Windows

You're out of luck. Autotags depends on inotify which is a Linux specific protocol.

Usage

Start generating ctags with:

$ autotags watch

This will watch the current directory and generate ctags whenever you save your files.

Optionally, you can specify a folder to watch:

$ autotags watch path/to/directory

Once you're done, stop generating ctags with:

$ autotags stop

This will stop watching the current directory.

Optionally, you can specify a folder to stop watching:

$ autotags stop path/to/directory

You can get more help with:

$ autotags help

A note on source control

Autotags creates files in the directory it's watching. If you're running autotags in a directory that is managed by source control you're going to want to ignore those files.

You can do this by adding the following lines in your source control's ignore file:

.tags
.autotags.pid

Contributing

If you have a question, found a bug or would like to discuss anything, open a pull request.

If you'd like to contribute code:

1. Fork this repository
2. Clone your fork
3. Make, commit & push your changes
4. Open a pull request

Check out CONTRIBUTING.md for more details on how to contribute.