This assumes Exuberant Ctags. The -R (or --recurse) option tells ctags to recurse into directories. Then, set the tags option in vimrc as: set tags=tags; The last semicolon is the key here. When Vim tries to locate the 'tags' file, it first looks at the current directory, then the parent directory, then the parent of the parent, and so on. This setting works nicely with 'set autochdir', because then Vim's current directory is the same as the directory of the file. If you do not like using 'autochdir' but want the same upward search, use: set tags=./tags;