Question

I was following the guide at teuton.blogspot.com to set up autocompletion, when I ran the command:

ctags –R --c++-kinds=+p --fields=+iaS --extra=+q \
    -f ~/.vim/commontags /usr/include

to generate a tagfile, only to realise that the command would generate a ‘commontags’-file of 1.5GB – a bit larger, than I’d have liked it to be, no doubt. So I was wondering is there some way of compressing the file and have vim still recognize it?

I tried running it through gzip, which churned it down to 25MB, but I’ve had no luck getting vim to use that file instead.

Any ideas? I’d be grateful!

/B2S

Answer 1

Using --excmd=number should cut the file size down by around 50% because ctags will only store line numbers of matches instead of a search pattern. This should be fine if the files in /usr/include don’t change very often.