How to Generate a ctags Database for Go with Absolute Paths?

Generating a ctags Database for Go

In this article, we will address the challenge of generating a ctags database for Go source code, considering the specific use case of wanting to use the tags file with Vim and emphasizing absolute paths.

The goal is to create a tags file (gosource.tags) that indexes the contents of Go source files for easy navigation within Vim. While the exuberant ctags package is commonly used for this task, it doesn't natively support Go.

To overcome this limitation, we need to manually add Go-specific language definitions to the ctags configuration file (~/.ctags). The following definitions, as suggested by http://go-wise.blogspot.com/2011/09/using-ctags-with-go.html, will enable ctags to recognize Go syntax:

--langdef=Go
--langmap=Go:.go
--regex-Go=/func([ \t]+\([^)]+\))?[ \t]+([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)//d,func/
--regex-Go=/var[ \t]+([a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]+)//d,var/
--regex-Go=/type[ \t]+([a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]+)//d,type/

With these definitions in place, we can generate the tags database using the command:

ctags -f gosource.tags -R $(pwd)

This command will scan the current directory and generate the tags file with absolute paths to the Go source files. The tags file can then be used with Vim for efficient code navigation.

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