Reload tags file Vim

asymmetric picture asymmetric · Jan 28, 2011 · Viewed 9.9k times · Source

How do i reload the tags file from within Vim?

Is a restart necessary?

Answer

jrdioko picture jrdioko · Jan 29, 2011

According to :help tag-binary-search, the tags file is binary (or linear) searched on each lookup, so there's no need to reload the file:

                                                        *tag-binary-search*
Vim uses binary searching in the tags file to find the desired tag quickly
(when enabled at compile time |+tag_binary|).  But this only works if the
tags file was sorted on ASCII byte value.  Therefore, if no match was found,
another try is done with a linear search.  If you only want the linear search,
reset the 'tagbsearch' option.  Or better: Sort the tags file!

Note that the binary searching is disabled when not looking for a tag with a
specific name.  This happens when ignoring case and when a regular expression
is used that doesn't start with a fixed string.  Tag searching can be a lot
slower then.  The former can be avoided by case-fold sorting the tags file.
See 'tagbsearch' for details.