[vidyesh]

> That you can open them up in VSCode, look around and figure out any bugs or issues you're having and even open pull requests to improve them.

I think the real skill then is to learn to navigate big codebases in few days time than taking a few weeks and then feel dejected by the time spent and still unsure.

I often feel ambitious for such endeavors but navigating big codebases take time, any tips?

[edg5000]

It helps if you can get your IDE's indexer configured, so that you find refererences to functions and variables reliably.

More importantly is to use an IDE with a good fast global search function and get comfortable with it. At least for me, 99% of navigating a large codebase is global search.

[missingdays]

Or use an ide that doesn't need indexed configured and just works

[bonniesimon]

Is there a way to get vscode to this level.

[edg5000]

For C++, I use clangd (works fine for GCC projects). The only config it needs is the path to compile_commands.json, which can be automatically generated by CMake and some other build systems. For TypeScript no config is needed. For Java there is the redhad Java plugin in VS which provides good indexing.

[vidyesh]

Not using VSCode currently but I think pretty much yes.

You can goto or peek definition in VSCode. And the find tool has the option to find all occurrences throughout your project.