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I hover over stdlib:

#include <stdlib.h>

I type M-. and it asks me:

Visit tags table (default TAGS):

I don't have one of those. I see a lot of information about TAGS in the emacs documentation: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TagsFile#tags_file

But what should I use, CTAGS, ETAGS, Universal CTags, Global Tags? Should I set this up in the makefile or in a key binding?

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I'd use etags because it comes with Emacs and is what the default implementation of M-. targets.

Given a C project you can use etags *.c *.h to generate the TAGS file in that directory and select it when prompted by M-.. Some C projects already provide a Makefile target for that, for example you can run make tags in the Emacs sources to generate them for the Lisp and C parts. This is highly useful to jump to the source of a definition.

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  • Is this something people generally do "out of band" from having a file up in the editor---done calling etags in the makefile via an external shell, versus having an emacs macro for running this process?
    – Mittenchops
    Commented Mar 23, 2021 at 15:42
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    Matter of taste really. For the Emacs sources it's not worth it for me to automate the task because I just use them to find out where a built-in is defined and only update them after each stable Emacs release. Do whatever works for you.
    – wasamasa
    Commented Mar 23, 2021 at 16:52
  • Yes, most projects add a tags target to their Makefile, and make it a dependency of the all target. That way they can regenerate the TAGS file whenever they recompile, such as with M-x compile.
    – db48x
    Commented Mar 24, 2021 at 2:50

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