# universal-ctags/ctags

A maintained ctags implementation

Repository: https://github.com/universal-ctags/ctags
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/ctags
Homepage: https://ctags.io
Language: C
License: GPL-2.0
License Family: copyleft
Topics: ctags, code-navigation, developer-tools, code-reading, code-analysis, code-completion, code-summarization, tagjumping
Last push: 2026-08-26T03:30:47+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 75/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 29, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 6005, "days_push": 7, "days_rel": 312, "gap_med": 146, "n_releases_24m": 2}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 7274, forks 667 (observed 2026-08-28T04:09:57.965958+00:00)

## What it is
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
- artifact type: cli-tool
- maturity: active
- function: developer-tools, parser, search-engine
- domain: developer-tools, text-editors, programming-languages
- platform: windows, cli, cross-platform
- tags: ctags, code-navigation, tag-jumping, source-code-indexing, editor-integration, command-line, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- universal-ctags/ctags (main) score 75

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:09:57.965958+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T17:38:54.853160+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/universal-ctags/ctags (fetched 2026-08-28T04:09:57.965958+00:00, sha c8dd993e1f49)
  - homepage: https://ctags.io (fetched 2026-08-29T08:34:45.790781+00:00, sha 2e2b5ffc7a05)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.