install Ctags and Taglist without root

Ctags and Taglist seem to be quite popular plugins for vim editor. Since I'm novice to Linux. It took me several hours to figure out how to configure them for my vim on the department machine. It's kind of tricky because I have no root right on that machine.

I mainly borrowed methods from the following three places,

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/04/ctags-taglist-vi-vim-editor-as-sourece-code-browser/

This one intrigues my curiosity to try out Ctags and Taglist.

http://superuser.com/questions/66367/is-it-possible-to-install-ctags-without-root-privs

The above site introduces how to install Ctags without root.

http://vim-taglist.sourceforge.net/installation.html

The last one is for installing taglist without root.


The main idea of installing Ctags without root is to compile it by yourself and install it in your home directory.

First download Ctags from its webpage and type in the following commands.

$ tar zxf ctags-5.8.tar.gz
$ cd ctags-5.8
$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME
$ make && make install


This will compile and install ctags in your home directory. The resulting binary will be: $HOME/bin/ctags

That's all I did to make Ctags work in my vim. If it doesn't work for you. Just check the second webpage. I omitted several steps which seems not critical to me.

For the Taglist, just follow the instructions in the third page. I only finished the first step - download taglist.zip and uzip it to .vim folder and it works.

The first website contains detailed description about how to use Ctags and taglist in vim. Have fun!