ctags

Raised as a usability problem by 5 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2012–2026), in 5 threads.

People raised many different problems with ctags, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 5 complaints

Setup guides are outdated and assume prior knowledge, making basic steps hard to figure out2026-01-08
Hard to memorize tag navigation shortcuts; setup frustrates and gets abandoned2023-12-28
Tools for autocompletion and go-to-definition are super complicated to install and use2017-11-06
Jumping to a definition returns every same-named symbol instead of the specific one2013-02-11
Opening a struct tag lists every matching declaration, ignoring which files are included2012-06-13