ctags-lsp for Mac

Note: This is documentation for the development version! The docs for the last release version are here.

CTags Language Server

A Language Server Protocol (LSP) implementation using universal-ctags as backend, supporting 100+ languages.

This won't replace your dedicated language server, and it doesn't try to. The goal is to have a "better than nothing" language server that's trivial to setup for any language.

What it does

On startup, ctags-lsp runs universal-ctags to index your workspace and keeps that index in memory to provide code completion, go-to-definition, and document/workspace symbols.

It never creates or updates tagfiles.

Installation

brew will automatically install dependencies for you.

When installing with mise or go, you must install universal-ctags yourself (ctags installation).

Use with your editor

Any editor with a built-in LSP client should work. Working examples are below.

Neovim

Helix

Add this to ~/.config/helix/languages.toml:

Advanced

Speeding up startup

Most projects are completely indexed in less than 1s. If startup is slow for your workspace: Limit which languages are being indexed with --languages. The option is passed through to ctags unchanged; for available options see the universal-ctags manual on the topic. Leverage an existing tagfile, so ctags-lsp doesn’t have to run ctags on startup, with --tagfile.

Tagfiles

You can use an existing tagfile with --tagfile=. When set, the server parses the tagfile and skips the workspace scan. This is only intended as a fallback option to possibly improve performance, and should not be used otherwise.

ctags-lsp will never write or update tagfiles.

For obvious reasons, --languages has no effect when using a tagfile.

CLI options