universal-ctags/ctags

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

7274 stars · 667 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Universal Ctags is a maintained implementation of ctags that generates index (tag) files of language objects found in source files for many programming languages. These index files let text editors and other tools quickly locate and jump to definitions of functions, classes, variables, and other symbols.

Use cases

• generate tag files for code navigation in vim or emacs
• jump to function definitions in a large codebase
• index symbols across many programming languages
• define custom language parsers with optlib
• generate emacs-style TAGS files
• enable code completion and code reading in editors

When to choose

• you need fast, editor-integrated symbol navigation without a language server
• you work across many programming languages and want one indexing tool
• you want a maintained successor to Exuberant Ctags
• you need lightweight code navigation in terminal editors

When to avoid

• you need full IDE features like refactoring or type-aware navigation (use a language server instead)
• you need semantic analysis of code rather than syntactic tag indexing
• you want a GUI code browser

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

developer-tools parser search-engine developer-tools text-editors programming-languages windows cli cross-platform ctags code-navigation tag-jumping source-code-indexing editor-integration command-line linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="universal-ctags/ctags")