Modern JavaScript ctags configuration

Essentially, ctags will scan all files you ask it to and look for what it understands to be symbol definitions. These are classes, functions, variable names, and so on. ctags has a large list of known languages, but the JavaScript support hasn’t yet been the greatest.

To start, make sure you have exuberant-ctags installed, as opposed to regular ctags. You can brew install ctags on a macOS machine, for example, which will install the latest version of exuberant-ctags.

Generating ctags

I use ctags to jump to the definition of a symbol in a given project. There are generally two ways I achieve this: from a cursor over the top of a symbol and using normal-mode commands to search the list of defined tags.

Jumping to a definition under the cursor

While reading code and the cursor is on top of a known symbol, pressing Ctrl+] will jump to that definition.

Searching the available tags

If you know the tag you want but are nowhere near it, you can :tag <tagname> to jump to it’s definition. The :tag command supports tab completion; I often use :tag searches to jump to class or constant definitions.

Navigating through multiple matches

Either of these ways of jumping to definition may result in multiple tag matches. You can navigate the tag stack with :tnext (briefly, as :tn) or :tprevious (:tp). If you’d like to see a list of definitions found for any given tag, you can :tselect (:tsel).

Including other packages in your generated tags file

After a bit of pruning and studying, this is the JavaScript-specific portion of my ~/.ctags file looks like this:

Finally, and following Mr. Grasso’s example, let’s get rid of some over-greedy matching and wrap it up into a nice alias:

alias jtags=”ctags -R app config lib && sed -i ‘’ -E ‘/^(if|switch|function|module\.exports|it|describe).+language:js$/d’ tags”

Happy vimming!

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