#ctags

I’ve been using vim and the terminal for ~30 years, and am working now in a VSCode shop.  I am probably the only holdout, using terminal tools (tmux, vim, cscope, ctags, perl, …).  I am a keyboard guy, and am generally hopeless in a UI of any sort, and don’t find them particularly intuitive. I keep trying to make the VSCode switch, but then get frustrated, as I want to do something that I can do…

Writing’s too hard

For a long time I’ve tried to make writing stories more like programming. Programmers have all sorts of tools.

A compiler’s a tool, not just because it compiles the program for but because it finds mistakes for you. Mistakes like You Didn’t Initialise this Variable and That Function Doesn’t Exist.

What’s the writer’s equivalent? I suppose a spell- or grammar-check. But there’s nothing that will make sure your story doesn’t have plot holes. You have to – why does it hurt so much? – use your brain.

Programmers also have lots of ways to get to places in their projects quickly. One tool that does this is Ctags.

Ctags

Ctags is a program that makes a sort of database of your code. Editors like Vim use it to let you jump directly to functions, data structures, etc. It’s really, really, really fucking useful.

Here’s an attempt at a demonstration. Say you’ve written a program with one function in it, called do_the_thing. If you run Ctags on that file, Ctags will write a tag file that your editor can read so it knows where that function is. So in Vim, for example, you could type “:tj do_the_thing” and bam, Vim will take you there. You could also (in Vim) put your cursor somewhere that function is written and press ctrl + ]. Bam. Like:

Your cursor ↓ do_the_thing ();

Bam.

So I wanted Ctags for writing. But it didn’t work on Markdown, and nobody seemed to care!!!! No fucker, it seemed, shared my longing. I even tried to write my own program to do it. A few times actually. I failed.

Well, now Ctags works with Markdown. Universal Ctags, that is. The version I was using (that’s still default in most Linux distros) is Exuberant Ctags. Universal is a newer fork.

So now I write all of my notes in Markdown. Here’s an example:

# Soraen # Soraen Tororo # our guy ## Personality Blunt but charming Business-minded and has fucked someone over in the past Soft-hearted A hoe ## From Another town, not far That's why he's got no parents ## History He left his town because his parents are ice-cold He got at job at a jeweler's, dicked over the guy when he was old and took over the shop ## Looks Good-looking, blonde ## Age Forty

In Markdown, you define headings with #. You add more #s to the # to increase the heading level.

You’ll see I’ve made three top-level headings, “Soraen”, “Soraen Tororo” and “our guy”. If you were to compile this to HTML or epub (which is what you do with Markdown) you’d have three headings one after the other and it’d look silly. I suppose I’m using them sort of as tags. I want to be able to get to Soraen by typing any of these things.

Using omincomplete with my current vimrc I have the problem that the popup menu blocks the definitions in the split window behind it.

There is much discussion of getting tags for different languages, .e.g. C++ for previous versions, or for changing colors, but not a lot for this issue.

Vim has the ability to color syntax highlight nearly 500 languages. Part of this highlighting includes knowing what keywords are part of a language. Many filetypes already have custom completion scripts written for them, the syntaxcomplete plugin provides basic completion for all other filetypes. It does this by populating the omni completion list with the text Vim already knows how to color highlight. It can be used for any filetype and provides a minimal language-sensitive completion. To enable syntax code completion you can run: setlocal omnifunc=syntaxcomplete#Complete You can automate this by placing the following in your .vimrc (after any

":filetype" command): if has("autocmd") && exists("+omnifunc") autocmd Filetype * \ if &omnifunc == "" | \ setlocal omnifunc=syntaxcomplete#Complete | \ endif endif