Most IDEs and text editors have a "jump to definition" feature that allow you to easily navigate source code; you can achieve the same in Vim by using Exuberant Ctags:
- Most Linux distributions will have it in their package manager; e.g., in Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install exuberant-ctags
- Go to your project directory and run:
Note: you can add a cron job to do this periodically (in order to account for source code changes).
- Add the following to ~/.vimrc:
set tags=tags " (or whatever you used for outputfile)
Note: each project will have its own tags file; vim will look for it in the folder it was launched from (so you will probably want to run it from the same location as ctags -R).
Note: each project will have its own tags file; vim will look for it in the folder it was launched from (so you will probably want to run it from the same location as ctags -R).
- Optional: exclude the tags file from version control (e.g., .gitignore)
To navigate to a definition in Vim, navigate to the symbol and press Ctrl+]; to go back use Ctrl+T. For help use :help tags.
