Options

The Options dialog lets you control some of the behavior of the plug-in. It can be found in Plugins, NppTags, Options....

Here you have these options:

Maximum depth is the number of directories the plug-in will go up to search for the tags database.

Jump Back Stack is the size of the stack of locations used by Jump Back.

Path to ctags.exe specifies the location of ctags.exe. When left empty, the plug-in will search for ctags.exe as described in the installation instructions.

NppTags.ini

The options are stored in an ini-file that is normally found in your “Application Data” directory and is named NppTags.ini. On my Windows 10 machine this directory is C:\Users\Frank\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++\plugins\config.

These are the default settings:

[Options]
Show=1
Depth=3
JumpBackStack=4
CtagsPath=

Show is controlled by the Show Tags Tree button on the toolbar and stores if the tree is shown.

The other options correspond to the various items in the dialog.

Debug section in NppTags.ini

For debugging it can be necessary to see the raw tags file or see what ctags is exactly doing. You can manually add an extra section with read-only options to the NppTags.ini to control what happens to the automatically generated tags file. These are the default settings:

[Debug]
DelTags=1
OverwriteTags=1
CtagsVerbose=0

When DelTags is set to 0 the plug-in will not delete the generated tags file after it is converted to the database.

When OverwriteTags is set to 0 and a tags file is found the plug-in will not overwrite and regenerate this existing tags file before generating the database. When set to 0, this implies that DelTags is set to 0 as well. Can be useful when regenerating the database but you don’t want to execute ctags every time.

When CtagsVerbose is set to 1 the --verbose flag is added when ctags is executed. The output is written to tags.stdout and tags.stderr.