Re: Why Emacs uses etags when all other editors use ctags?

[Robert Thorpe <rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com>]

Andrey Lisin <andrey.lisin@gmail.com> writes:

> Hello,
>
> really why? Are there any advantages of etags format over standard
> ctags? Is there any reason to increase the entropy?
>
> Could anyone explain it? :)

Ctags is very VI specific.  The portion of each tag that takes the
editor to the right place in the code is a command for the ex program.
("Ex" is a part of VI originally it was a separate program but it isn't
in modern VI-like editors).  A valid Ctags program could put all sorts
of things in that field.  Instead Emacs uses the number of bytes from
the start of the code file.

BR,
Robert Thorpe