Taglist: Exuberant ctags not found in PATH

Question

This morning, I started getting that message when I attempt to open a file in Vim. Vim is my editor of choice for config files, git commit messages and the like, but is not my day to day code editor. I clearly did something to invite this message, but I have no idea what. I did recently uninstall an older version of XCode from /Developer-3.2.6, but that's the only thing that comes to mind that seems even tangentially related.

I'm running OSX Lion. Is Excuberant ctags part of the base install? I know I didn't install it intentionally, but if it's not native, then maybe it came along with something else? Any ideas about how to either get the plugin back or remove references to it so I don't get the warning message?

Thanks.

Answer 1

That looks a lot like the message the taglist plugin emits when it can't find a ctags program. If you run :scriptnames, do you see plugin/taglist.vim in the list of sourced files? If you do, then you'll probably want to remove that and doc/taglist.txt under the same directory structure.

Answer 2

For Ubuntu and derivatives:

sudo apt-get install exuberant-ctags

With yum:

sudo yum install ctags-etags

Answer 3

FWIW I had the same error message on Ubuntu, I simply installed ctags and everything hunky dory. Thanks :)

Answer 4

If you are using Gvim in a Windows system, you should download a ctag Windows program (that is ctag.exe) and put the ctag.exe in the vim74 file dir, then reboot Gvim, and it will find it and use it! I hope this is helpful.

Take a look at this: http://vim-taglist.sourceforge.net/installation.html

Answer 5

Thanks, guys. I ended up reinstalling XCode and it looks like the problem has gone away. I have no idea how I got it into whatever state it was in, but it's back now and everything looks to be back to normal.

Answer 6

I encountered the same issue after upgrading to Mountain Lion. I fixed it by reinstalling the CLI tools from XCode preferences > Downloads. I had the CLI tools installed before upgrading. Not sure what happened, but it works now.

Answer 7

I encountered this issue on a host, but I didn't have permission to install any packages.

But i did find out the gctags was present on that system.

I created a softlink for the gctags binary in a location that was included in my PATH environment variable.

$ln -s /usr/bin/gctags ~/bin/ctags**

You can do the same if you find etags binary in your system, and have no way to install any packages.