Generating a reasonable ctags database for Boost

I know this post is a little old, but I just ran into the same problem. I looked into it a little further and it seems it is one folder in boost that is causing the problem: typeof. I am using boost 1.37 and my tags file was 1.5G, typeof was 1.4G of that. So I just created a tags file without that directory included and the resulting size was 70M. I was even able to sort it without running out of space :) I imagine in newer versions of boost they may be other projects that are too large however the general solution I found is this...

1. Generate a tag file for each boost folder seperately, a simple bash for loop should be able to do this.
2. Look at which ones are too large.
3. Either create a new single tags file excluding those large directories or keep the tag files separated simply deleting the ones that are too large.

This is the script I used (taken from comments):

for i in $(find -maxdepth 1 -type d | grep -v '^\.$' | sed 's/\.\///' ); do    echo $i;    ctags -f ~/tmp_tags/$i.tags -R --c++-kinds=+p --fields=+iaS --extra=+q --languages=c++ --sort=foldcase $i;done

Hope this helps.

use the option

--sort=foldcase

With this the searching of the tags becomes faster.

Quoting from the man page of ctags : "The foldcase value specifies case insensitive (or case-folded) sorting. Fast binary searches of tag files sorted with case-folding will require special support from tools using tag files, such as that found in the ctags readtags library, or Vim version 6.2 or higher (using "set ignorecase"). This option must appear before the first file name"

You SHOULD add this option to your ctags invocation:

    -I "BOOST_SYMBOL_VISIBLE BOOST_SYMBOL_IMPORT BOOST_SYMBOL_EXPORT BOOST_FORCEINLINE BOOST_CONSTEXPR=constexpr BOOST_CONSTEXPR_OR_CONST=constexpr BOOST_STATIC_CONSTEXPR=static\ constexpr BOOST_STD_EXTENSION_NAMESPACE=std BOOST_MOVABLE_BUT_NOT_COPYABLE+ BOOST_COPYABLE_AND_MOVABLE+ BOOST_COPYABLE_AND_MOVABLE_ALT+ BOOST_NOEXCEPT=noexcept BOOST_NOEXCEPT_OR_NOTHROW=noexcept BOOST_NOEXCEPT_IF+ BOOST_NOEXCEPT_EXPR+ BOOST_STATIC_CONSTANT BOOST_DELETED_FUNCTION BOOST_DEFAULTED_FUNCTION BOOST_NESTED_TEMPLATE BOOST_UNREACHABLE_RETURN+ BOOST_DEDUCED_TYPENAME=typename BOOST_CTOR_TYPENAME=typename BOOST_LIKELY+ BOOST_UNLIKELY+ BOOST_ALIGNMENT+ BOOST_FALLTHROUGH"

This is what I use for the ENTIRE /usr/include/boost subdirectory for Boost 1.55. I get a tags file that is ~128MB. The -I seems to be the key here and helps filter out spurious tag generation.

NOTE: I'm using ctags 5.9 on Ubuntu 14.04. I have a special -I for generating ctags for C++ standard headers. This took a while for me to figure out why some header files generated almost no tags while others generated enormous amounts of tags.