[Geany] tags

[Nick Treleaven]

On 09/10/2007 08:01:11 PM, John Gabriele wrote:
> On 9/10/07, Nick Treleaven <nick.treleaven at btinternet.com> wrote:
> > Geany can generate its own global tags files, since 0.11 (see the
> > 'Generating a global tags file' Tags subsection). They are
> > incompatible with ctags tags files.
> 
> Hm. It looks like Geany's tagmanager wraps/uses exuberant ctags... so
> why would a ctags-generated file be incompatible?
> 
Because they can store different sets of information.
The details of the fields written are in tm_tag_write(), tm_tag.c.

> Just curious, why not just use ctags externally (and add it to the
> "Preferences --> Tools --> tool paths" list)? Wouldn't things be much
> cleaner that way?
> 
It would be quite a lot of work to support ctags files, and also we 
need to be able to generate global tags files anyway (e.g. for 
languages CTags doesn't support: D, Haskell, ...). Also I imagine there 
would be annoying compatibility problems with different ctags releases/
command-line options.

> [...]
> The only way I've ever used tags is when I go into a source directory
> and run the ctags program, and then tell the editor to load the
> resulting tags file (which is usually just named "tags"). The manual
> indicates that Geany deals with 2 kinds of tags files: "workspace
> tags" and "global tags"... are workspace tags just in-memory (for 
> open
> files), whereas global tags are files residing in ~/.geany/tags?
> 
I think the manual doesn't refer to workspace tags 'files' - they are 
just parsed when documents are loaded.

Regards,
Nick