1.  CTags Navigation

Ted (and TDB) make use of Ctags to provide navigation through a user application. To begin navigation, use the menu entry File/Tag-Navigate to open the tags sidebar. Clicking <1> on any of the functions in the sidebar will go directly to it. Clicking <Control-1> will instead cause a new file window to open. This is useful if the function is not in the current file. Or click <3> to bring up the menul. When a requested file is already open in another window, that window is brought forward instead. Note, one should be careful using <1> as leaving the current file will loose any and all undo/redo information. A side effect of opening Ctags is that the commands there are available for command completion.

Information in the ctags window includes the object name, a dash, the file name and optional object type (in braces) for non-function/procs, as defined by ctags. For Tcl, the main ones are:

• (n) - namespace
• (v) - variable

and for C:

• (d) - #define
• (e) - enum
• (v) - variable (array)
• (s) - typedef

Here is a view of the Ctags navigation window:

2.  Ctags Generation

Note that opening the tag navigator triggers autoloading of the file tags. If this does not yet exist, a dialog appears to generate it. Two types of tag-rebuilds are supported: Internal and External. Internal is implemented in Tcl within Ted and works only for Tcl files. External works if the "ctags" program is installed in the OS and supports various file types including "C". Exhuberant ctags will also do Tcl as well as other types. The type of files to scanned for is taken from the current files extension.

In addition to this dialog, the unix ctags command may be used to directly generate a tags file. Also the menu entry File/Development/Generate-Ctags may be used to regenerates a tags file for source files in the directory of the current file.

© 2008 Peter MacDonald