[the_only_law]

I just wish there were better tools for navigating C codebases.

There’s been more than one time where I’m in some large auto tools based project trying to figure something out and there’s a call out to some dependencies I have no idea of.

Also many of the projects lack and sort of documentation or source code commenting. These aren’t someones pet project either. One of them was from a notable name in the open source community and the other one was a de-facto driver in a certain hardware space.

[pjmlp]

Using an IDE like VS/Clion/CDT/.. would already be of help.

Then there are tools like SourceGraph, CppDepend among others.

[Too]

Use clang to generate a compilation db. Most IDEs support this format out of the box, otherwise via plugin or routed through youcompleteme.

https://clang.llvm.org/docs/JSONCompilationDatabase.html

[loeg]

Have you tried ctags for navigation? Or clang-lsp?

[jhallenworld]

Try cscope.