Vim go to ruby class declaration

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/actio开发者_开发问答n_controller/base.rb

and look to commented reference of possible usage this class

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.

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.

ripper-tags sounds great but is having issues as of today (November 2013). I ended up using exuberant ctags (with a few tricks)

1- install exuberant ctags. If you're using osx, this article shows a little trick: http://www.runtime-era.com/2012/05/exuberant-ctags-in-osx-107.html

2- If you only wish to include the ctags for the files in your directory only, run this command in your directory:

ctags -R

This will create a "tags" file for you.

3- If you wish to include the ctags for your gems (this has been really helpful for me with RubyMotion and local gems that I have developed), do the following:

ctags --exclude=.git --exclude='*.log' -R * `bundle show --paths`

credit: https://coderwall.com/p/lv1qww (Note that I removed the -e option which generates tags for emacs instead of vim)

4- Add the following line to your ~/.vimrc

set autochdir 
set tags+=./tags;

(Why the semi colon: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Single_tags_file_for_a_source_tree )

5- Go to the word you'd like to follow and hit ctrl+] . hit ctrl+o to go back (https://stackoverflow.com/a/53929/226255)