universal-ctags has the objective of continuing the development from what existed in the Sourceforge area. Github exuberant-ctags repository was started by Reza Jelveh and was later moved to the universal-ctags organization.
The goal of the project is preparing and maintaining common/unified working space where people interested in making ctags better can work together.
Getting PACKCC compiler-compiler
Packcc is a compiler-compiler; it translates .peg grammar file to .c file. packcc was originally written by Arihiro Yoshida. Its source repository is at sourceforge. It seems that packcc at sourceforge is not actively maintained. Some derived repositories are at github. Currently, our choice is https://github.com/enechaev/packcc. It is the most active one in the derived repositories.
The source tree of packcc is grafted at misc/packcc directory. Building packcc and ctags are integrated in the build-scripts of Universal-ctags.
The latest build and package
If you want to try the latest universal-ctags without building it yourself...
Windows
Daily builds are available at the ctags-win32 project. Go to the releases page to download zip packages.
Mac
See Homebrew Tap for Universal Ctags
Docker
Go to ctags-docker and follow
instructions to download the uctags script. Docker will automatically fetch
the image from Docker Hub.
Snap
Go to ctags-snap and
clone the ctags-snap repo. Then, follow instructions to build the
snap package of ctags. Snapcraft will automatically fetch the source
code from GitHub.
How to build and install
To build with Autotools, see docs/autotools.rst for more information.
(To build on GNU/Linux, Autotools is your choice.)
To build on Windows, see docs/windows.rst for more information.
To build on OSX, see docs/osx.rst for more information.
Manual
Man page (ctags.1) is generated only in Autotools based building process. In addition rst2man command is needed.
rst2man is part of the python-docutils package on Ubuntu.
Difference
You may be interested in how universal-ctags is different from exuberant-ctags. The critical and attractive changes are explained in docs/*.rst. The preformatted version is available on line, http://docs.ctags.io/.
The most significant one is that Universal-ctags doesn't load
~/.ctags and ./.ctags at starting up time. Instead, it loads
~/.ctags.d/*.ctags and ./.ctags.d/*.ctags. See the above web
site and man pages
(man/ctags.1.rst.in and man/ctags-incompatibilities.7.in in the
source tree).
Pull-requests are welcome!