Introduced changes - cztchoice/ctags GitHub Wiki

Maintainer:	Masatake YAMATO <[email protected]>

Many changes have been introduced in universal-ctags. Use git-log to review changes not enumerated here, especially in language parsers.

Importing most of the changes from exuberant-ctags

See "exuberant-ctags" in "Tracking other projects" about the status of importing. Some changes in Fedora and Debian are also imported.

New parsers

The following parsers have been added:

ada
clojure
coffee xcmd
css
d
ctags option library optlib
falcon
go
json
m4 optlib
mib optlib
rust
windres
SystemVerilog

See "Option library" about optlib. See "External parser command" about xcmd.

Heavily improved language parsers

php
verilog

Miscellaneous new options

Tagging #undef

--undef[=yes|no]: Allows disabling the generation of macro tags from #undef directives.

Wildcard in options

For the purpose gathering as much as possible information from source code "wildcard"(*) in option is introduced.

--fields=*

Enables all available fields.

--<LANG>-kinds=*

Enables all available kinds for LANG.

--kinds-<LANG>=*

Alternative representation of --<LANG>-kinds=*.

--*-kinds=SPEC

Applies SPEC as kinds to all available language parsers.

--*-kinds=*

Enables all available kinds to all available language parsers.

Notice message and `--quiet` option

There were 3 classes of message in ctags:

fatal

A critical error is occurred. ctags aborts the execution.

warning

An error is occurred but ctags continues the execution.

verbose

Mainly for debugging purpose.

notice is a new class of message. It is less important than warning* but more important for users than *verbose. Generally the user can ignore *notice. With --quiet option can be used to turn off the printing the notice class messages.

`--input-endocing=ENCODING` and `--output-endocing=ENCODING` options

Japanese programmers sometimes use Japanese language in comments in source code. Of course it is not limited to Japanese. People may use their own native language in some case. In such case conding becomes an issue.

ctags didn't care it. ctags just reads input as just bytes sequence and use them as is when writing tags entries.

In other hand vim cares it. When loading a file, vim converts the file content internal format with one of encodings specified in fileencodings variable.

As the result of this difference, vim cannot move the cursor to the definition of a tag as users expect with pattern matching. ctags writes patterns in tags file.

Good news is that there is a way to notify vim the encoding used in a tags file with _TAG_FILE_ENCODING pseudo tag in the tag file.

This feature solves this issue utilizing _TAG_FILE_ENCODING pseudo tag.

This patch introduces two type of options (--input-encoding=IN and --output-encoding=OUT).

As specified encoding with these options ctags converts input from IN encoding to OUT encoding. ctags uses the conveted strings when writing pattern parts of tags lines. As the result tags output is encoded in OUT encoding. In addition OUT is specified in the top tags file as value for _TAG_FILE_ENCODING pseudo tag. As OUT utf-8 is as default.

NOTE: Converted input is NOT passed to language parsers. The parsers still deal with input as bytes sequence.

With --input-encoding-<LANG>=IN, you can specify LANG own input encoding. It overrides the global default value given with --input-encoding.

The example usage can be found in Tmain/{input,output}-encoding-option.d.

Acceptable IN and OUT can be listed with iconv -l or iconv --list. It is up to platform where ctags runs.

To enable the option, libiconv is needed in your platform. In addition --enable-iconv must be specified to configure before making ctags. On windows mingw32, you must specify WITH_ICONV=yes like below:

C:\dev\ctags>mingw32-make -f mk_mingw.mak WITH_ICONV=yes