gentags.nvim/README.md

gentags.nvim

Tags generator/management for old school vimers in Neovim.

To be honest, it seems that tags have become useless in Neovim today, LSP and treesitter replaced tags and make (Neo)vim a more modern editor.

While there's some gap when a language's LSP server or treesitter implementations is insufficient, which happened to me actually, thus bring tags back to my mind, it's still worth as a supplement to fill the gap.

Table of Contents

• Features
• Requirements
• Install
• Usage
• Configuration
• Recommendations
• Alternatives
• Development
• Contribute

Features

• Automatically generate tags for both workspace/single file.
• Running in background & terminate immediately on nvim leave.
• Incremental update on file save.
• Disk cache management and garbage collection.
• Real-time status for Neovim components such as statusline.

Requirements

• Neovim ≥ 0.7.0.
• universal-ctags (default backend).

PRs are welcome to add other backends.

Install

With lazy.nvim

require("lazy").setup({
  {
    "linrongbin16/gentags.nvim",
    config = function()
      require('gentags').setup()
    end,
  },
})

With pckr.nvim

require("pckr").add({
  {
    "linrongbin16/gentags.nvim",
    config = function()
      require("gentags").setup()
    end,
  },
})

Usage

Gentags will automatically run below jobs in backend when you work in the nvim editor:

• Load a tags for the whole worksapce or the single file on first open a file.
• Generate tags for the whole worksapce or the single file on first open a file.
• Update tags after you save writtens on a file.
• Terminate all background child processes when you leave nvim.

By default all tags are generated in stdpath('cache') . '/gentags.nvim' directory.

• For UNIX/Linux: ~/.cache/nvim/gentags.nvim.
• For Windows: $env:USERPROFILE\AppData\Local\Temp\nvim\gentags.nvim.

Configuration

To configure default options, please use:

require('gentags').setup(opts)

The otps is an optional lua table that overwrites default options.

For complete options and defaults, please see configs.lua.

Recommendations

Recommend use tags with below plugins to smooth your editing flow:

• vista.vim: View and search symbols on current file.
• cmp-nvim-tags: Use tags as nvim-cmp's completion data source.

Alternatives

• gentags.lua: Auto generates tags by filetype.
• vim-gutentags: A Vim plugin that manages your tag files.

Development

To develop the project and make PR, please setup with:

• lua_ls.
• stylua.
• luarocks.
• luacheck.

To run unit tests, please install below dependencies:

• vusted.

Then test with vusted ./test.

Contribute

Please open issue/PR for anything about gentags.nvim.

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