articles tagged lifesavers

who needs docs when you have ctags

Ever since I watched Aaron Patterson's Peepcode Play-by-Play, I've been absolutely fascinated with the use of CTags to jump around the various codebases you have installed (if you use Ruby, you know how much of a maze it can be to figure out exactly where an error is coming from!). As the name would imply, CTags were created for C programmers dealing with massive codebases that typically had minimal to no documentation. Developed during the first boon of open source distribution, and created by some of the people on the BSD UNIX project (it was originally released with BSD UNIX), it was championed as a quick, easy and light-weight way of moving around a codebase.