vim auto select tags upon launch

Question

I have multiple projects (folders), and each of them has its corresponding tags generated.

I found every time I launch vim it only links to my first tags file (:set tags?), I need to manually set the proper tags for each project.

Is there a way to configure vim so every time I launch a file in a specific project that tags gets set?

For example:

• If I launch any file vim ~/ProjectA/src/main.cpp will set tags=~/ProjectA/tags
• similary vim ~/ProjectB/include/header.h will set tags=~/ProjectB/tags

Thanks

Answer 1

You can use:

set tags=./tags;

(You can also include the other entries from the default 'tags', such as just tags, which means a file with that name in the current directory, and also the uppercase variants, if those interest you as well. Use commas to separate different entries. The ; is not a separator.)

This will look for a file named tags on either the same directory as the current file, or on a directory above it. The search keeps going up until reaching the root of the tree.

See :help file-searching, in specific:

2. Upward search:

Here you can give a directory and then search the directory tree upward for a file. You could give stop-directories to limit the upward search. The stop-directories are appended to the path (for the 'path' option) or to the filename (for the 'tags' option) with a ';'. If you want several stop-directories separate them with ';'. If you want no stop-directory ("search upward till the root directory) just use ';'.