Eli Zaretskii wrote:

You don't need to regenerate the TAGS file unless you add or delete
files, functions, macros, or typedefs. And for the purpose of search
and replace, you don't need to regenerate unless some files were added
or deleted.

Exactly - which is just about every time I search! When I'm programming I'm adding new files and definitions constantly.

An alternative method of multi-file search and replace is the Q
command in Dired buffers. You mark those files in which you wish to
search and replace, and then press Q; the rest is just like with TAGS,
except that no TAGS file is needed.

Thanks - didn't know that. It looks useful.

Back in my Windows days I used an editor called TSE, and I wrote something for it that achieved much the same effect as find-tag and friends without the need to manually update the tags file. It maintained the equivalent of a TAGS file and dynamically updated it as you added new files and definitions. I rather miss it's convenience - maybe one day I'll miss it enough to write an Emacs equivalent :) I suspect that all that wouldbe needed would be to hook something in to rerun "etags" at the appropriate times, so it would be easier than what I wrote for TSE, where I had to implement the whoe etags style functionality. Unless someone else has already done it?

Andy B

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