ctags: can you ignore matching tags for a specific file extension?

Question

small background:

• I have a code base with multiple languages: C, C++, Python, Sh, Makefile, Perl.
• I configure my ctags generation right now to just do: C,C++,Python,Sh.
• I point vim at the ctags tag file located at ~/tags (right now i only have one ctags tag file)

When I am editing a C++ file with extension *.cc, I hit ctrl+] to jump into the tag dummy_function_name and I get 10 matches and 9 out of 10 matches are for python files.

Can you ignore matching tags for a specific file extension (in this case python files)? if yes, how?

Answer 1

(Disclaimer: I'm not the best at ctags but here is one solution I came up with on my own.)

Solution:

• for each language generate one ctags tag file
• for each language tag file create a new vim autocommand that sets the tag file to the associated language tag file based on the file extension

Notes:

This solution would required making your ctags generation more complex (instead of one tag file there are N tag files for N languages). In this example, you would one 3 tag files (one for C/C++, one for Python, one for Sh). Then your vim config would need to be more complex with N autocommands for the N tag files.