- Written and documented by David Deley

Multi-Edit tags makes it easy to quickly find your coded routines. This works for all programming languages that Multi-Edit supports. My example here will be for the Multi-Edit CMAC code files in the Multi-Edit\src folder.

In my previous post I mentioned we wanted to look for macro "SaveFile", but we didn't know which file in the Multi-Edit\src folder had the "SaveFile" code. Once we set up Multi-Edit Tags it will be quick and easy to find the "SaveFile" macro code.

In Multi-Edit select VIEW -> TAGS and VIEW -> Navigation Pane. (The navigation pane is toggled on and off via VIEW -> Navigation Pane, and what the Navigation Pane shows is determined by what items are checked under the third section of the VIEW menu, such as "Code Manager", "Project", "System", "Tags", and possibly others.)



Initiate a Wildcard Tag Scan, which can be done in three different ways:
1) By clicking on the button (in the Tag View section of the image above).
2) Or by clicking on the button and then selecting "Wildcard tag scan".
3) Or by selecting TAGS -> "Wildcard tag scan..." (main menu).



Click the button next to the "File(s)" field. Navigate to your Multi-Edit\src folder (e.g. "C:\Program Files\Multi-Edit\src"), click on a file such as "Ada.s":



(Note: Originally instead of selecting "Ada.s" I did a CTRL-A to select all the *.s files and then clicked "Open". The resulting string of file names was longer than 1024 characters and overflowed an internal buffer, so I changed this post to do it this way instead.)

Click "Open", which will take you back to the "Wildcard Tag Scan" window:



Edit 'Ada.s' to read '*.s', and enclose the whole string in double quotation marks because there are spaces in the file name.



Click "OK", and Multi-Edit will scan all the files.

(NOTE: Another way to identify the files we want scanned would be to set your working directory to "C:\Program Files\Multi-Edit 9.10\Src\" and then just enter "*.s" in the Wildcard Tag Scan field.)

There's one caveat you need to know at this point. You need to load a *.s file into Multi-Edit and be switched to that window before the Tags feature will work. Doesn't matter what *.s file you load as long as the file name has a .s extension. Here I've loaded "Ada.s" as a convenient file. (Note both the files and the tags in the Tags pane are listed in reverse alphabetical order. You can sort them ascending by right-clicking in the window to get the context menu and selecting SORT -> ASCENDING.)



Now we're ready to search for the "SaveFile" macro code. There are two ways to initiate a search:

1) TAGS -> "Prompt for tag..."
2) Or by clicking the button on the Tags pane and then selecting "Prompt for tag"

Enter "SaveFile" and click OK.



Multi-Edit will take you straight to the code. [Note: if nothing seems to happen, double check that you currently are switched to a window with a *.s file in it.]

Now go to TAGS -> CONFIGURE and select the "Browse files first" checkbox.



Repeat the "Prompt for tag..." and enter "SaveFile" again. This time a dialog box comes up.



Click "Load" to go to the file into a normal edit window. (Clicking "Next" will instruct Multi-Tags to search for the next tag of the same name, if one exists.)

Another way to search for the tag is if you're in any *.s file and the word "SaveFile" appears, right click on the word "SaveFile" and select "Find tag under cursor" (or place the cursor on that word and do Shift+F11).

Another thing you can do at any time is click the Browse Current File button on the main toolbar and you will get a list of all routines in the current file. You can use this list to easily jump to any routine.