Otags III: Emacs and vi Tag Generation for OCaml

Otags generates TAGS files suitable for emacs and vi/vim from OCaml sources. Otags III relies on the standard OCaml parser from the compiler-libs library (in contrast to previous otags reloaded versions that employed camlp4).

Recent Changes

2017-08-26: otags 4.05.1 released

Update for OCaml 4.05.
Enable tagging of attributes and methods in class signature, now that the OCaml parsetree contains the necessary location info.
Support pre-processed files with line directives again: For this, all files are read twice now, because the standard OCaml parser does not tell if it found a line directive, see also OCaml PR 823.

2017-01-05: otags 4.04.1 released

Update for OCaml 4.04
Improved future compatibility: Otags can now be compiled with future OCaml versions as long as they only add constructors in the abstract syntax tree.

2016-09-22: otags 4.03.1 released

Switch to OCaml standard parser from the compiler-libs library and drop the dependency on camlp4. All options controlling the camlp4 engine (-pa, -extern, ...) are gone.
Restrict input to what ocamlc accepts: no syntax extensions or toplevel directives. Additionally, files with line directives (from ocamlyacc, ocamllex or cppo) are not supported.
Fix file descriptor leakage for option -r.

Download

Latest version: [otags-4.05.1.tar.gz].

Previous versions: 4.04.1, 4.03.1, 4.02.2, 4.02.1, 4.01.1, 4.00.2, 4.00.1, 3.12.5, 3.12.4, 3.12.3, 3.12.2, 3.12.1, 3.11.3, 3.11.2, 3.11.1

Installation

./configure
Optionally use --prefix, --bindir or --mandir if you don't like the default installation directories.
make
make install
You might need to become superuser before make install.

Bleeding edge OCaml users may use the configure option --no-version-check to compile otags for an unsupported version of OCaml.

Usage

otags -r .

to generate an Emacs TAGS table for all .ml and .mli files in the current directory tree. For more details consult the man page.

Compatibility and Otags version numbers

For tagging source files otags uses a recursive function that traverses the abstract syntax tree that comes out of the OCaml parser. It is therefore quite unlikely that a given otags version works well for more than one major OCaml version. For this reason otags version numbers simply follow the OCaml version numbers. For instance otags version 4.03.1 is the 1. otags release for OCaml 4.03.xx. In general, an otags version X.YY.Z will only compile with OCaml X.YY.*

History

Cuihtlauac Alvarado and Jean-Francois Monin wrote the first versions of otags based on camlp4. Some old otags version can still be found on their websites.

Around 2005 I released a few versions for OCaml 3.09. All these old otags versions require the original camlp4 from Daniel de Rauglaudre, which is now available as camlp5. My latest release for the old camlp4 was otags 3.09.3.3 for OCaml 3.09.3. The debian maintainers developed some patches to make this version compile with later OCaml versions and camlp5.

For 3.11 I rewrote otags from scratch for the new camlp4 and released several versions under the name otags reloaded. The modular structure of camlp4 made it possible to switch the parsing engine at runtime between files and to parse all syntax supported by camlp4 at full native speed without external camlp4 processes. However, the increasing incompatibility between camlp4 and OCaml and camlp4's sloppiness on parsing locations created more and more difficulties. For instance, otags 4.02 failed on the OCaml standard library because camlp4 was unable to digest the attribute annotations in there.

Starting from 4.03, otags is based on the standard OCaml parser from the compiler-libs library and has been renamed to otags III.

last changed on 22 Sep 2016 by Hendrik