I am trying to setup better go development environment and decided to give vim-go a try (which also resulted in me replacing Vundle with Pathogen, which is much more straightforward). Installing everything was a breeze and I only encountered a problem when I tried to make tagbar work, because tagbar does not work with BSD ctags and requires Exuberant ctags 5.5.

The simplest way how to install exuberant ctags is with brew.

ondra@nb218 ~/Downloads/ctags-5.8
$ brew install ctags
Warning: You are using OS X 10.11.
We do not provide support for this pre-release version.
You may encounter build failures or other breakage.

However brew is still having problems running on 10.11 and many packages fail to build, ctags being on exception. So let’s see how we can deploy ctags into /usr/local without stepping on brew’s toys.

First of all, we need to determine the prefix to use via brew diy:

ondra@nb218 ~/Downloads/ctags-5.8
$ brew diy --name=ctags --version=5.8
--prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/ctags/5.8

Now you can use brew fetch to download the source for ctags or just download it from sourceforge. To get the source using brew, use:

ondra@nb218 ~/Downloads/ctags-5.8
$ brew fetch --build-from-source ctags
==> Downloading https://downloads.sourceforge.net/ctags/ctags-5.8.tar.gz
Already downloaded: /Library/Caches/Homebrew/ctags-5.8.tar.gz
SHA1: 482da1ecd182ab39bbdc09f2f02c9fba8cd20030
SHA256: 0e44b45dcabe969e0bbbb11e30c246f81abe5d32012db37395eb57d66e9e99c7

==> Downloading https://gist.githubusercontent.com/naegelejd/9a0f3af61954ae5a77e7/raw/16d981a3d99628994ef0f73848b6beffc7
Already downloaded: /Library/Caches/Homebrew/ctags--patch-26d196a75fa73aae6a9041c1cb91aca2ad9d9c1de8192fce8cdc60e4aaadbcbb
SHA1: 24c96829dfdc58b215bfccf5445a409efba1ffe5
SHA256: 26d196a75fa73aae6a9041c1cb91aca2ad9d9c1de8192fce8cdc60e4aaadbcbb

Anyhow, when you have the source extracted, run configure && make with the prefix from brew diy:

ondra@nb218 ~/Downloads/ctags-5.8
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/ctags/5.8
Exuberant Ctags, version 5.8
Darwin 15.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 15.0.0: Sun Jul 26 19:48:55 PDT 2015; root:xnu-3247.1.78~15/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64
checking whether to install link to etags... no

And link ctags via brew using brew link:

ondra@nb218 ~/Downloads/ctags-5.8
$ brew link ctags
Linking /usr/local/Cellar/ctags/5.8... 2 symlinks created

And you are done. When building is fixed for brew under 10.11 simply unlink ctags and use brew install as usual.

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