La Vita è Bella

If you use vim for programming, then you can't live without ctags (can you?). ctags generate the "tags" file, vim and its plugins use this file to help your programming more efficiently.

By default, vim will only use the "tags" file under your current working directory. You can use this command to see it:

:set tags?

Generally, your "tags" file under you current working directory won't contain informations about system libraries (glibc, stl, etc.). If you miss them, you can generate tags file for your system libraries, and ask your vim to load them:

set tags+=/usr/local/include/tags
set tags+=/usr/include/tags

If you are working on a big project, which have many subdirectories, the "tags" file under each working directory may be not enough, as you also need some information about the functions under other subdirectories. So you can generate a "tags" file under your project root, and ask vim to load it when editing a file within your project:

autocmd BufEnter ~/work/myproj/* :setlocal tags+=~/work/myproj/tags

Thanks for Ryan Phillips, you can also add "tags;" (notice the semicolon) to your tags so that vim will automatically look up "tags" file in the file tree (":help file-searching" for document):

set tags+=tags;

To make it easier to use, I've also made a script named "projtags.vim" so that you need only set your project directories in your vimrc:

let g:ProjTags = ["~/work/proj1"]
let g:ProjTags+= [["~/work/proj2", "~/work/proj2.tags"]]

Happy vimming :P