title: Tags for Emacs: Relationship between etags, ebrowse, cscope, GNU Global and exuberant ctags
body: <p>I work on C++ projects, and I went through Alex Ott's <a href="http://alexott.net/en/writings/emacs-devenv/EmacsCedet.html" rel="noreferrer">guide to CEDET</a> and other threads about tags in StackOverflow, but I am still confused about how Emacs interfaces with these different tag systems to facilitate autocompletion, the looking up of definitions, navigation of source code base or the previewing of doc-strings.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>What is the difference (e.g. in terms of features) between  <code>etags</code>, <code>ebrowse</code>, <a href="http://ctags.sourceforge.net/" rel="noreferrer"><code>exuberant ctags</code></a>, <a href="http://cscope.sourceforge.net/" rel="noreferrer"><code>cscope</code></a>, <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/global/" rel="noreferrer"><code>GNU Global</code></a> and <a href="http://code.google.com/p/google-gtags/wiki/GTagsEmacsClient" rel="noreferrer"><code>GTags</code></a>? What do I need to do to use them in <strong>Emacs</strong>?</p></li>
  <li><p>Do I need semantic/senator (CEDET) if I want to use tags to navigate/autocomplete symbols? </p></li>
  <li><p>What does semantic bring to the table on top of these different tag utilities? How does it interface with these tools?</p></li>
  </ol>