Tags
A tags file is a text file that contains the location of all the identifiers (functions, classes, methods, ...) of one or more of your source code files. Roughly speaking, for each identifier, that file contains a line that states: the name of the identifier, the file where it is defined and the line where that happens. Each of those lines is known as a tag.
Vim provides native support to use tags files, and they can be used to provide a Go to definition kind of functionality. For example, if you create a tags file for one of your projects, you would be able to know where each identifier in it is defined.
One of the advantages of tags files is that their format is a pretty simple and language agnostic which allows them to support plenty of programming languages.
To know how to do create the tag files for your projects, check the Code browsing point in the configuration section of the documentation.
The rest of this section explains how to use tags once the editor is configured to generate/read them.
Jumping to/from tags
To jump to and from tags, use the following commands:
- Space o:
jump to the definition of the identifier under cursor (if the identifier is defined in multiple locations let the user to choose which one to jump to)
- Space i:
go back to previous tag
That is, the editor keeps a stack with the jump history and allows you to jump back to each step of that stack with Space i.
To see that history of jumps and where you are on it you can use:
:tags
Also, if you want to jump to the definition of an identifier by typing the identifier yourself, you can use:
:tjump <identifier>