Installing Exuberant Ctags on Windows (Vista and XP)

Question

I want to use Exuberant Ctags on Vista (and probably the XP laptop) at work; no choice about the OS. I\'m use GVim instead of the Flex Builder recommended by my co-worker, becau

Answer 1

If you have the option, I would think the path of least resistance would be to use Cygwin. If you install cygwin and the ctags package from cygwin, you'll just need to open up the cygwin shell and run ctags (or maybe ctags -R if you want it to be recursive, which you probably do) from your source code directory. No need to build anything this way.

Answer 2

The exuberant ctags binary is pre-built and available for download at http://ctags.sourceforge.net/

1. Unzip the file contents to somewhere like C:\Program Files\ctags
2. Then add the ctags.exe path to your PATH environment variable.
   1. In XP, right click on My Computer and select Properties.
   2. Move to the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button.
   3. Click the System variables select box, find and highlight the Path variable.
   4. Click the Edit button.
   5. Append to the Variable Value ";C:\Program Files\ctags" (without the quotes).

Now in the command shell you should be able to use the command ctags to generate your tags. To create the tags file:

ctags -R "C:\Documents and Settings\My User\My Documents\My Code"

Since you are using vim, you probably want the taglist plugin (which I would link to if I had enough reputation). You do not need to create the tags file to use this plugin.

Answer 3

The windows zip file already contains a compiled ctags.exe, so you should not need to do a build yourself. Open CMD and have a look at ctags from there.