If you are not a Vim user this post will probably not be of much interest or value… anyways, I just wanted to document this, for myself as well :)
Ctags, specifically exuberant ctags is a code-indexing system that creates files which summarize all the methods and properties in your classes. Its also the name of the command line utility that performs the indexing on source code and generates the tags files.
Ctags and Vim go hand in hand.. by specifying tags files to use in your .vimrc file, vim will be able to jump to the file where a class, method, or property is defined. Tags are also used for code-completion, and syntax highlighting.
Unfortunately ActionScript is not natively supported by ctags. Fortunately it is not hard to add support for it. I found out here how to do this for JEdit, but the process is much the same for Vim.
Download Ctags source. I used ctags-5.8.tar.gz which worked on my Ubuntu and Mac. I just put it in $HOME/ctags/ and extracted it with ‘tar zxvf ctags-5.8.tar.gz’
Ok , go into the source directory (ctags-5.8 or whatever your version is)
Add this actionscript.c file into the source directory (you’ll need to Save As… actionscript.c, as github doesn’t seem to have a per-file download link). I found that the version linked the JEdit example did not work in Vim, so I modified the RegEx expressions in it so that they produced more standard tags.
In source.mak, add a line that says “actionscript.c " under SOURCES and “actionscript.$(OBJEXT) " under OBJECTS.
In parsers.h, we need to add the following line under #define PARSER_LIST:
ActionScriptParser, \(an easy way to make these changes is just copy the line and edit the language name)
Build it. Do the usual
./configure make
You may need to do a ‘make clean’ first to remove any previous builds.
- Try ‘./ctags –list-languages’, and actionscript one should show up. Then if looks good, go ahead with the final ‘sudo make install’. Thats it.
Now for usage … to build a tags file for a AS3 project in a ‘src’ folder, just do the following:
ctags -R -f tags path/to/src
Eg. I made a tags file for the Flex SDK:
ctags -R -f ${FLEX_HOME}/frameworks/projects/framework/src/tags ${FLEX_HOME}/frameworks/projects/framework/src
ctags may not be happy about generating a tags file over an existing file, so you may need to remove a previous one first. It may also warn about some null references in source code.. this doesn’t seem to matter.
Then I added the line
set tags+=$FLEX_HOME/frameworks/projects/framework/src/tags
to my .vimrc, and I can jump to any Flex SDK file by ctrl-] on the name of a class, method, or property. (ctrl-t jumps back). I can also recommend the taglist plugin. This instantly makes tags for your current file and shows the symbols (organized by type) in a window split.
I also found that it was easy to add support for Haxe, by renaming a few things in the actionscript.c file and renaming it haxe.c (and making the other additions to sources.mak and parsers.h). You can probably figure it our yourself, or you can download the added and patched files here: