Vim go to ruby class declaration

Question

I want to follow from

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base

to

/home/slavik/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/actionpack-3.1.0.rc6/lib/action_controller/base.rb

and look to commented reference of possible usage this class

Answer 1

Yes, there is at least one way. You can use exuberant ctags in combination with the tags option of Vim. Pratically, you have to execute ctags in the /home/slavik/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/ like :

ctags -R tags

See ctags --help if you want to dig into tags customization. Then you have to add this file to your tags path in vim. Using something like the following:

:set tag+=/home/slavik/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/tags

In order to understand how powerful this vim features is take a look at Browsing_programs_with_tags.

Answer 2

There are couple of issues with ctags which has pretty old and ugly parser:

• Ctags doesn't deal with: module A::B
• Ctags doesn't tag (at least some of) the operator methods like ==
• Ctags doesn't support qualified tags, -type=+
• Ctags doesn't output tags for constants or attributes.

I would recommend better project ripper-tags based on official Ruby parser called Ripper which is included in Ruby. It is fast and accurate: https://github.com/tmm1/ripper-tags

You can also install gem-ripper-tags to have tags files automatically generated after gem installation: https://github.com/lzap/gem-ripper-tags

Please note that these days, August 2013, there is a big refactoring of ripper-tags which can lead to change of command line options or gem-ripper-tags interface. If things are not working, update both gems in couple of days and read help screen to learn new options.