Jed Tags with ntags (for dummies)

Working with Jed just got better. I've finally figured out how to use TAGS with Dino Leonardo's ntags extension

When programming in Jed I can now hold the cursor over a function in the code and by just hitting Alt+. it quickly jumps to the definition of that function. This is great if you for example need to quickly find out how a function works and what the parameter options are without having to a) dig out where it is defined (which file) and b) dig out where in the file it's defined.

Here's how I did it:

$ wget http://www.paneura.com/~dino/files/ntags.tar.gz
$ aunpack ntags.tar.gz
$ sudo mv ntags /usr/share/jed/lib
$ jed .jedrc

Then all I had to do was to add the following lines to my .jedrc file:

% include the ntags library 
set_jed_library_path(get_jed_library_path() + "," +
                    "/usr/share/jed/lib/ntags");
% start autoload of ntags
() = evalfile("autoload.sl");

Now, to generate the tags file you need to install Exuberant Ctags which unlike basic Emacs ctags supports 33 different programming languages. If you have APT just do this:

$ sudo apt-get install exuberant-ctags
$ cd mypythonplace
$ ls *.py | wc -l
19
$ ctags-exuberant *.py

Now, let's hope I can get used to this luxury and that I start using it.