universal-ctags has the objective of continuing the development from what existed in the Sourceforge area. Github exuberant-ctags repository was started by Reza Jelveh and was later moved to the universal-ctags organization.

The goal of the project is preparing and maintaining common/unified working space where people interested in making ctags better can work together.

If you want to try the latest universal-ctags without building it yourself...

Daily builds are available at the ctags-win32 project. Go to the releases page to download zip packages.

See Homebrew Tap for Universal Ctags

Go to ctags-docker and follow instructions to download the uctags script. Docker will automatically fetch the image from Docker Hub.

Go to ctags-snap and clone the ctags-snap repo. Then, follow instructions to build the snap package of ctags. Snapcraft will automatically fetch the source code from GitHub.

To build with Autotools, see docs/autotools.rst for more information. (To build on GNU/Linux, Autotools is your choice.) To build on Windows, see docs/windows.rst for more information. To build on OSX, see docs/osx.rst for more information.

Man page (ctags.1) is generated only in Autotools based building process. In addition rst2man command is needed.

rst2man is part of the python-docutils package on Ubuntu.

You may be interested in how universal-ctags is different from exuberant-ctags. The critical and attractive changes are explained in docs/*.rst. The preformatted version is available on line, https://docs.ctags.io/.

The most significant one is that Universal-ctags doesn't load ~/.ctags and ./.ctags at starting up time. Instead, it loads ~/.ctags.d/*.ctags and ./.ctags.d/*.ctags. See the above web site and man pages (man/ctags.1.rst.in and man/ctags-incompatibilities.7.in in the source tree).

Pull-requests are welcome!