RubyGems Automatic Ctags Invoker

Nary a day of Ruby development goes by where I don’t run
gem open or bundle open. And when I go rooting around
in a gem, I want tags. As good as I’ve gotten at ctags -R ., I’ve
grown weary of it. So I wrote a RubyGems plugin to automatically invoke
Ctags on gems as they are installed.

Installation

If you haven’t already, install Exuberant Ctags and make sure it
comes first in $PATH. With Homebrew, brew install ctags. Now all
that’s left to do is install gem-ctags and perform a one-off indexing of
the gems that are already installed:

gem install gem-ctags
gem ctags

If you’re using RVM, I recommend extending your global gemset by adding
gem-ctags to ~/.rvm/gemsets/global.gems. Put it at the top so the
gems below it will be indexed.

Troubleshooting

If you see

$ ctags -R
ctags: illegal option -- R
usage: ctags [-BFadtuwvx] [-f tagsfile] file ...

you do not have the correct version of ctags in your path.

Just add the following to your .bashrc and be happy:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Vim Tips

To easily edit a gem with your current working directory set to the
gem’s root, install gem-browse.

If you have rake.vim installed (which, by the way, is a misleading
name), Vim will already know where to look for the tags file when
editing a gem.

If you have bundler.vim installed, Vim will be aware of all tags
files from all gems in your bundle.

If you want to get crazy, add this to your vimrc to get Vim to search
all gems in your current RVM gemset (requires pathogen.vim):

autocmd FileType ruby let &l:tags = pathogen#legacyjoin(pathogen#uniq(
      \ pathogen#split(&tags) +
      \ map(split($GEM_PATH,':'),'v:val."/gems/*/tags"')))

I don’t like to get crazy.

Contributing

Don’t submit a pull request with an ugly commit
message or I will ignore your patch until I have the
energy to politely explain my zero tolerance policy.

License

Copyright © Tim Pope. MIT License.