rusty-tags

A command line tool that creates tags - for source code navigation by using ctags - for a cargo project, all of its direct and indirect dependencies and the rust standard library.

Prerequisites

• ctags installed, needs a version with the --recurse flag

On a linux system the package is most likely called exuberant-ctags.

Otherwise you can get the sources directly from here or use the newer and alternative universal-ctags.

Only universal-ctags will add tags for struct fields and enum variants.

Installation

$ cargo install rusty-tags

The build binary will be located at ~/.cargo/bin/rusty-tags.

Usage

Just calling rusty-tags vi or rusty-tags emacs anywhere inside of the cargo project should just work.

After its run a rusty-tags.vi / rusty-tags.emacs file should be beside of the Cargo.toml file.

Additionally every dependency gets a tags file at its source directory, so jumping further to its dependencies is possible.

If a dependency reexports parts of its own dependencies, then these reexported parts are also contained in the tags file of the dependency.

Rust Standard Library Support

Tags for the standard library are created if the rust source is supplied by defining the environment variable RUST_SRC_PATH.

If you're using rustup you can get the rust source of the currently used compiler version by calling:

$ rustup component add rust-src

And then setting RUST_SRC_PATH inside of e.g. ~/.bashrc:

$ export RUST_SRC_PATH=$(rustc --print sysroot)/lib/rustlib/src/rust/src/

Or without rustup by getting the rust source by yourself:

$ git clone https://github.com/rust-lang/rust.git /home/you/rust
$ cd /home/you/rust
$ git checkout stable
$ export RUST_SRC_PATH=/home/you/rust/src/   # should be defined in your ~/.bashrc

Using rustup is the recommended way, because the you will automatically get the correct standard library tags of the currently used compiler version.

Configuration

The current supported configuration at ~/.rusty-tags/config.toml (defaults displayed):

# the file name used for vi tags
vi_tags = "rusty-tags.vi"

# the file name used for emacs tags
emacs_tags = "rusty-tags.emacs"

# options given to the ctags executable
ctags_options = ""

Vim Configuration

Put this into your ~/.vimrc file:

autocmd BufRead *.rs :setlocal tags=./rusty-tags.vi;/
autocmd BufWritePost *.rs :silent! exec "!rusty-tags vi --quiet --start-dir=" . expand('%:p:h') . "&" | redraw!

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.

If you've supplied the rust source code by defining $RUST_SRC_PATH:

autocmd BufRead *.rs :setlocal tags=./rusty-tags.vi;/,$RUST_SRC_PATH/rusty-tags.vi

Sublime Configuration

The plugin CTags uses vi style tags, so calling rusty-tags vi should work.

By default it expects tag files with the name .tags, which can be set with vi_tags = ".tags" inside of ~/.rusty-tags/config.toml.

MacOS Issues

Mac OS users may encounter problems with the execution of ctags because the shipped version of this program does not support the recursive flag. See this posting for how to install a working version with homebrew.

Cygwin/Msys Issues

If you're running Cygwin or Msys under Windows, you might have to set the environment variable $CARGO_HOME explicitly. Otherwise you might get errors when the tags files are moved.