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.

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.

If you want to try the latest universal-ctags without building it yourself...

Daily builds are available at the ctags-win32 project. Go to the releases page to download zip packages.

See Homebrew Tap for Universal Ctags

Go to ctags-docker and follow instructions to download the uctags script. Docker will automatically fetch the image from Docker Hub.

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.

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.

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!