My previous email didn't get the entire chain of responses: It was missing my final response recommending that you consider fixing XEmacs' etags.el rather than using the GNU etags.el: Stephen, I'm sorry if my response was offensive. Your point is well taken. I will file the bug report. Just to clarify, etags.el is the library that XEmacs uses to interpret the tags file. It does not produce the tag file. The etags distributed with XEmacs produces excellent tag files (and has replaced my Cygwin etags, which requires recompilation to supports regular expressions). I don't necessarily recommend using the GNU Emacs etags.el, although I am using it as a stopgap. The XEmacs etags.el has a lot of extra useful functions that could lead to much better tags browsing in the future For example, it would be relatively easy to extend the XEmacs etags.el to have it let you jump to any file referenced in TAGS with auto-completion on filenames (AFAIK, it is not possible to do this extremely desirable task with the existing tag functions, although the XEmacs etags.el comes much closer. Correct me if I'm wrong.) Once the 'named tags' bug is fixed, the XEmacs etags.el will rock.