Improving Etags support for fortran?

Question

When using xref with Fortran I noticed that indexing by etags is highly incomplete; Almost exclusively subroutines (and maybe functions) are index, but modules, types, constants and global variables are all ignored.

This situation is even confirmed by the executable:

$ etags --help --lang=fortran
In Fortran code, functions, subroutines and block data are tags.

I am trying to fix the situation by adding regular expressions manually, e.g.

find -name "*.f90" | \
    xargs -d $'\n' etags --append \
          --regex='{fortran}/[[:blank:]]*module[[:blank:]]+\([[:alnum:]_]+\)/\1/i' \
          --regex='{fortran}/\(?:[^(]*\|.*::.*\)\(?1:\_<.*?\_>\)[[:blank:]]*=/\1/i' \
          --regex='{fortran}/[[:blank:]]*type[[:blank:]]*\(?:::\)?[[:blank:]]*\(?1:[[:alnum:]_]+\)/\1/i'

While it works, this makes me wonder if any better method is available -- maybe a specialized tools giving better etags for fortran, or at least a centralized place to store my custom regex list.

Answer 1

The simple solution: Use ctags -e instead of etags (assuming "Exuberant Ctags"^[1])

While man ctags explicitly says that etags is preferred for use with emacs, ctags seems to have much better fortran support. I now use:

ctags -e --recurse
#      :      :
#      :      `- Recursive processing of subdirectories.
#      :         Apparently also filters by extension, 
#      :         avoiding the need for manual filtering of `find`.
#      :
#      `- Output in emacs mode. 
#         Also changes filename from "tags" to "TAGS"

---

^[1] There are multiple flavors of "Ctags". On my system, "Exuberant Ctags" was installed; Language support, Emacs-compatbility and supported flags may deviate. In the comments, "Universal CTags", a fork^[2] of "Exuberant CTags", was recommended.

^[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctags#Universal_Ctags