~/.git causes gutentags to index the entire home directory

[justinmk]

I have a ~/.git/ folder for managing dotfiles. I don't want this to trigger gutentags. Is there a way to avoid this, while still enabling gutentags in ~/foo/.git subdirectories, which doesn't involve me setting up a bunch of autocmds and manually managing g:gutentags_enabled?

Thanks for this project, I like the choices you have made.

[Konfekt]

Perhaps by abusing g:gutentags_exclude? (Supposedly meant to supply file extensions à la *.dll but perhaps accepting full paths as well)

[justinmk]

g:gutentags_exclude just gets passed to ctags -x (which seems totally redundant with ~/.ctags). And as far as I know there's no good way to specify a -x pattern such that it will ignore a certain directory, yet not ignore subdirectories.

[nikital]

@justinmk Off topic: I used to have a ~/.git to manage my dotfiles and I had problems similar to yours. Various tools that are supposed to find the root of the project would find the home directory.

This was annoying, so I changed my setup to avoid this class of problems entirely: I moved the dotfiles to ~/.dotfiles and use GNU Stow to symlink them to ~.

Something like:
http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html

[justinmk]

Thanks, but using a tool to manage dotfiles is cheesy, and I doubt stow even works on windows.

nested git repos are a legitimate use of git, so tools built on git should be able to handle it. If gutentags supported projectionist, it could avoid this problem.

[ludovicchabant]

I myself use some ad-hoc install/uninstall scripts (both on Mac/Linux and Windows), because it's frankly not much to write, has no dependencies, and I can do funky stuff like generate an .hgrc file instead of linking to one, because I also need to bring in other local stuff with absolute paths, and I don't want to assume anything about where I cloned my dotfiles repo. See here: https://bitbucket.org/ludovicchabant/dotfiles/src/8b6ca7e40f371f9eea323aded0dfb1c66e8bdd43/install.sh?at=default

Anyway, back to @justinmk's original issue: If I understand this correctly, you have your whole home directory under Git, which is why you don't want to generate tags for it because it's super big? I have some changes coming up that add the ability to specify things like .tagsignore files and other things like that in the root directory (I'm not set yet on the design), which would let you ignore things more easily per-project. Stay tuned :)

[justinmk]

@ludovicchabant https://github.com/tpope/vim-projectionist is a general solution to project "root finding" (and other things).

It would be ideal if I could tell gutentags to not try to find a root, and only build tags if projectionist#path() (the project root) is non-empty.

[sunaku]

@ludovicchabant Any luck on the .tagsignore file? My CPU is pegged at 100% while this plugin attempts to index my entire homedir just because I happen to have a ~/.git folder. 😱

[sunaku]

Here is a workaround I'm using to avoid this issue until it gets fixed properly. 😅

diff --git a/autoload/gutentags/ctags.vim b/autoload/gutentags/ctags.vim
index cf5a576..6292068 100644
--- a/autoload/gutentags/ctags.vim
+++ b/autoload/gutentags/ctags.vim
@@ -36,6 +36,12 @@ function! gutentags#ctags#init(project_root) abort
 endfunction

 function! gutentags#ctags#generate(proj_dir, tags_file, write_mode) abort
+    " Don't treat user's (massive) home directory as a project!
+    " https://github.com/ludovicchabant/vim-gutentags/issues/13
+    if a:proj_dir == $HOME
+        return
+    endif
+
     " Get to the tags file directory because ctags is finicky about
     " these things.
     let l:prev_cwd = getcwd()

[ludovicchabant]

Oh my, sorry, I totally forgot about this (I think I have too many projects going on :) feel free to submit pull requests if anyone wants to fix it themselves though ;) )

Anyway, turns out that the .tagsignore thing I mentioned is only a partial solution since it's more about being able to specify gutentags_exclude per project (kinda like a .gitignore/.hgignore but for ctags). It could solve the OP's problem, but not if you really want zero tags support in a given project. For that, I just added with 7316197 the ability to create a .notags file at the root of the project. It just flat out disables Gutentags for that project. I hope it helps!

[sunaku]

Perfect! 👍 The .notags file solves the problem for me. 🙇

[ludovicchabant]

Good!
FYI everyone, I also closed issue 17 which lets you write a standard .ctags options file at the root of your project, which lets you among other things specify --exclude rules for your project (so it makes the whole .tagsignore thing moot).

[justinmk]

@ludovicchabant Cool, thanks!

[sunaku]

To automate 🚀 this workaround, I wrote this snippet in my vimrc:

" prevent gutentags from indexing the entire home directory
" https://github.com/ludovicchabant/vim-gutentags/issues/13
let s:notags = expand('~/.notags')
if !filereadable(s:notags)
  call writefile([], s:notags)
endif

Cheers! 🍰

[justinmk]

@sunaku You could just commit ~/.notags to your git repo, if you source-control your home dir. That's what I did: https://github.com/justinmk/config/blob/master/.notags

[sunaku]

💡 Great idea! 👍