Ctags for Puppet - Three (previously missing) Pieces

Back in the day, when I was coding in C on the Unix kernel (before Linux even existed), I used vi's tags functionality extensively.  We had a patched version of vi (before vim existed) that supported tag stacks and a hacked version of ctags that picked up all kinds of things like #defines, and it used the -D flags you used when compiling to get you to the right definition of something that was defined many times for various architectures, etc.  But, when I moved to C++ with function overloading, ctags broke down for me, and I quit using it.

Recently, I inherited pretty big Puppet code base.  For a long time, I was just navigating it by hand using lots of find and grep commands.  Finally, I broke down and figured out how to get ctags working for my Puppet code on OS X.  Actually, other people figured it out, but here were the three pieces I had to string together.

A modern version of ctags - aka exuberant ctags.  This is pretty easy to install with homebrew, but there is a rub: OS X already has a version of it installed, and depending on how your PATH is configured, the stock version might trump homebrew's version.  Matt Pollito has a nice, concise blog post explaining how to cope with that.

Tell ctags about Puppet's syntax: Paul Nasrat has a little post describing the definitions needed in the ~/.ctags file and the invocation of ctags.

Tell vim about Puppet's syntax: Netdata's virmrc file has the last piece:
set iskeyword=-,:,@,48-57,_,192-255
The colon is the key there (no pun intended) - without that, vim wasn't dealing with scoped identifiers and was just hitting the top-level modules.

The last bit is for me to re-learn the muscle memory for navigating with tags that has atrophied after 20 years give or take.  BTW, if you don't have tags, a cool approximation within a single file is '*' in command mode - it searches for the word under the cursor.

enjoy,
Charles.