Creating TAGS for Ruby and Emacs

Question

I ran the following from my top level Ruby on Rails directory.

find . -name "*.rb" | etags -

Then within Emacs I visited that tag file. This works reasonably well to find some of the methods and most of the files, however it is having trouble finding some of the extra methods/classes that I use in my helpers directory.

For example, I have a file in my helpers directory called my_foo_helper.rb If I search my tags for that file, it finds it. However, if I try to find a tag for one of the methods within that module it doesn't find it at all.

If I use Aptana or something like that it seems to be able to locate those methods.

How can I resolve this problem?

Answer 1

Have you checked rtags?

rtags is a Ruby replacement for ctags - allowing for name navigation in source code using vim, emacs and others.

Also look at this Emacs ruby-mode posting.

Answer 2

This should work fine with etags that comes with Emacs 25.1 (to be released later this year). The pre-release builds are available.

If you're still having problems, please file bugs with M-x report-emacs-bug and include specific (but maybe fictionalized) code examples.

Answer 3

I use a number of ruby/rails specific plugins for vim.

Being the behemoth that emacs is, I presume there would be similar. The plugins I use actually process the code (Rather than grepping it) giving it a better awareness of such a dynamic language, which leaves my editor better able to work out what I'm looking for.

Answer 4

etags still doesn't deal nicely with ruby. On OSX though there is a simple solution, see: http://www.murphybytes.com/2012/06/28/etags-for-ruby-in-emacs-on-a-mac/