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Atelier vs Universal Ctags
What Universal Ctags says, vs. what it scored.
Tag/definition indexer for editor jump-to-definition -- exact tag lookups only, no free-text or semantic query support.
What Universal Ctags says about itself
“Universal Ctags (abbreviated as u-ctags) is a maintained implementation of ctags. ctags generates an index (or tag) file of language objects found in source files for programming languages.”
Publishes no numbers ...never against another search tool ~4.5k stars
What it actually scored — same 14 repos, same 7,213 queries as every other tool
| Tool | MRR | p95 | p100 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ★ Atelier +semantic (BGE) | 0.727 | 390ms | 1057ms |
| ★ Atelier lexical (default) | 0.676 | 134ms | 319ms |
| Universal Ctags | 0.237 | 1ms | 12ms |
No performance or accuracy claim published in either direction -- it's positioned purely as editor infrastructure, not a search product. Consistent with that: the fastest tool in the entire field (1ms p95, 12ms p100) and the lowest-scoring on whether the tag it hands back is the one you actually wanted (0.237 MRR).
The true story
Every tool in this comparison, Universal Ctags included, has been through the exact same 14 repositories and 7,213 query/gold pairs that score Atelier — no cherry-picked queries, no separate corpus. Full methodology, every raw number, and the other 9 tools →