rusty-tags

A command line tool that creates tags - for source code navigation by using ctags - for a cargo project and all of its dependencies.

Prerequisites

• ctags installed
• git installed if git dependencies are used

Installation

• get rustc and cargo from here
• git clone https://github.com/dan-t/rusty-tags.git
• cd rusty-tags
• cargo build --release

The build binary will be located at target/release/rusty-tags.

Usage

cargo build has to be called at least once, to download the source code of the dependencies. If a dependency gets added or updated, then most likely cargo build has to be called again.

Just calling rusty-tags vi then anywhere inside of a cargo project should just work and after its run a rusty-tags.vi file should be beside of the Cargo.toml file.

rusty-tags will also put a rusty-tags.vi to the source code of every dependency, so after jumping to a dependency, you're able to jump further to its dependencies.

rusty-tags should also correctly handle the case if a dependency reexports parts of its own dependencies.

Currently rusty-tags doesn't support local dependencies and dependency overwrites. For git dependencies it only searches inside of ~/.cargo/git/checkouts/ and for crates.io dependencies inside of ~/.cargo/registry/src/github.com-*.

Rust Standard Library Support

The source code of Rust already contains a script for creating tags, but if you only want to jump into the standard library then reducing the directories gives better results.

First get the Rust source code:

$ git clone https://github.com/rust-lang/rust.git
$ cd rust

And now execute the following script inside of the rust directory:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

src_dirs=`echo $PWD/src/{liballoc,libarena,libbacktrace,libcollections,libcore,libflate,libfmt_macros,libgetopts,libgraphviz,liblog,librand,librbml,libserialize,libstd,libsyntax,libterm}`

ctags -f rusty-tags.vi --options=src/etc/ctags.rust --languages=Rust --recurse $src_dirs

ctags -e -f rusty-tags.emacs --options=src/etc/ctags.rust --languages=Rust --recurse $src_dirs

You can now add this tags file manually to your list of tags files in your editor settings or you can copy the rusty-tags.vi and rusty-tags.emacs files to ~/.rusty-tags/rust-std-lib.vi respectively ~/.rusty-tags/rust-std-lib.emacs. Then rusty-tags will automatically add the standard library tags file to every tags file it creates.

The automatic adding might be a bit annoying if you reguarly update the rust compiler and if the standard library changes. So adding the tags file manually might be the better option and also speeds up the creation of the tags.

Vim Configuration

Put this into your ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/rust.vim file:

set tags=rusty-tags.vi;/
autocmd BufWrite *.rs :silent !rusty-tags vi

or, if you want to manually add the tags for the rust standard library:

set tags=rusty-tags.vi;/,path-to-rust-source-code/rusty-tags.vi
autocmd BufWrite *.rs :silent !rusty-tags vi

The first line (only supported by vim >= 7.4) ensures that vim will automatically search for a rusty-tags.vi file upwards the directory hierarchy.

This tags setting is important if you want to jump to dependencies and then further jump to theirs dependencies.

The second line ensures that your projects tag file gets updated if a file is written.

Normally you want to call the rusty-tags command in the backgroud by adding a &:

autocmd BufWrite *.rs :silent !rusty-tags vi &

But I had sometimes strange behaviours this way that I couldn't track down until now. So you can try using it with the &, and if it doesn't work, if the tags aren't correctly updated, then you know the reason.

Emacs Support

There's now a first version with emacs support.

Replace every occurrence of vi with emacs in the README e.g.:

• rusty-tags vi => rusty-tags emacs
• make TAGS.vi => make TAGS.emacs
• rusty-tags.vi => rusty-tags.emacs

Instead of merging the tags files like in the vi case, an include line is added to the emacs tags file which includes the tags files of the dependencies.

I haven't tested the emacs tags, so some feedback would be nice!