Is there a way to have the same tag name in ctags?

Question

I'm looking to write foos,bars,bazs by using a custom language in ctags. It works fine, I can jump to the tag but I'm only allowed to have one unique tag name. I would like to be able to jump through all the tags in different files with a tag named todo1. Ctags is not generating more than one of the same tag name. If I fix this then the next question would be how to jump in vim to the same tag names? I presume :tn probably would not work because I've tried having the same tag names in asciidoc in the past.

For example:

[todo1]
This is something important in some/file/path/foo.txt

[todo1]
This is something important in another/path/bar.txt 

[foo]
Some other foo.

My ctags config file is

--langdef=text
--langmap=text:.txt
--regex-text=/^\[([A-Za-z0-9]+)\]/\1/s,section/

In vim I do.

:! ctags -f ~/text/.tags -R ~/text/
:setlocal tags=~/text/.tags

ctags --version

Universal Ctags 5.9.0(b49410f), Copyright (C) 2015 Universal Ctags Team
Universal Ctags is derived from Exuberant Ctags.
Exuberant Ctags 5.8, Copyright (C) 1996-2009 Darren Hiebert
  Compiled: Dec 16 2020, 11:27:14
  URL: https://ctags.io/
  Optional compiled features: +wildcards, +regex, +iconv, +option-directory, +xpath, +packcc

Answer 1

The answer is very simple yet many people don't know this so I'm going to post the answer so that it can help someone out in the future.

I'm not sure if ctags allows for same name tags but it's irrelevant. What you can do is generate your own tags as explained in :help tags-file-format. This can be accomplished with a script containing less than 20 lines of code with a program like rip grep or you can use vimwiki plugin which implements this feature.

Here is an example of a simple tags file that jumps to bar:

bar exampleFile.txt 9
bar exampleFile.txt 17

Answer 2

I'm looking to write foos,bars,bazs by using a custom language in ctags. It works fine, I can jump to the tag but I'm only allowed to have one unique tag name. I would like to be able to jump through all the tags in different files with a tag named todo1. Ctags is not generating more than one of the same tag name.

This is wrong. ctags can generate tags for each name even if two of them have the same name.

If you are using Universal Ctags, use --excmd=combine option.

$ cat /tmp/foo.txt
[todo1]
This is something important in some/file/path/foo.txt

[todo1]
This is something important in another/path/bar.txt 

[foo]
Some other foo.

$ u-ctags -o - --langdef=text --langmap=text:.txt '--regex-text=/^\[([A-Za-z0-9]+)\]/\1/s,section/' /tmp/foo.txt 
foo /tmp/foo.txt    /^[foo]$/;" s
todo1   /tmp/foo.txt    /^[todo1]$/;"   s
$ u-ctags -o - --excmd=combine --langdef=text --langmap=text:.txt '--regex-text=/^\[([A-Za-z0-9]+)\]/\1/s,section/' /tmp/foo.txt 
foo /tmp/foo.txt    7;/^[foo]$/;"   s
todo1   /tmp/foo.txt    1;/^[todo1]$/;" s
todo1   /tmp/foo.txt    4;/^[todo1]$/;" s

Answer 3

Thanks to @masatake. This has already been resolved.

Add --fields=+n option (or --fields=+'{line}' option in Universal Ctags) to the ctags command line. That adds a line: field to each tag entry. The line: fields may make the tag entries unique.