[Aperocky]

My opinion is manual navigation is O(log(N)) for well organized projects. Which scales very well - especially as the package should be optimized for local changes/split into dependencies when it gets above a certain size. For a project that's not organized at all, it's O(N) which means it will soon become untenable.

Most project is somewhere in between but from what I've seen it tends towards the latter. As there are overwhelming amount of people utilizing the ease of IDE and do not care at all about the structure, or maintenance of the structure of a package.

[anyfoo]

I'm talking about pretty large projects. Try navigating, for example, an operating system kernel for its very many functions you encounter just when writing a device driver. You won't know where to find everything (most things maybe even), so manual navigation is certainly not O(log(N)).

Unless you want to mindlessly click through directory structures and files hunting for vague hints, what are you going to do? Full text search? Unless you're both careful and lucky, you will find a lot or all of the call sites as well. Which, again, gets worse the larger the project (and thus the number of call sites) gets.

Then, you better remember the arguments' type, order, and significance of the many functions you call, otherwise it's back to the navigation I've described above every time you want to use it.

This was one of the more extreme examples, but the whole problem starts to rear its ugly head pretty early in much smaller projects. The issue is however somewhat masked if you are the only or one of very few developers with high familiarity of the project. Of course then you know which file to click on and where to scroll to.

But then, even on a small project, that project rarely exists in a vacuum (the OS kernel example above is actually almost somewhat of an exception). You will use other frameworks and libraries, at the very least the language's standard library, usually, which is effectively a big project again.

[Aperocky]

> what are you going to do? Full text search?

Actually yes, I often have a grep tab open on the next terminal tab (whereas vim lives in the other one). Granted, I don't use it nearly as often as one would CTRL-B in intellij. grep (and other GNU utilities) is very powerful and can be used for more than just text searches. In fact for even project I develop using intellij I often find myself doing the same grep window in remote just because it's faster and I can make manual edits on the fly.

For navigation, I usually to tabe or vert sb and this allow the other call signature to simply exist on my desktop real estate or a gt away until I don't need it anymore.

You might feel like I'm simply proving your point, and you might just be right. But I do use the same method of editing on larger project outside of personal space, and delivers at speed if not just due to the fact that I need very minimal setup (the context switching is hefty when the package space is littered with various packages and not just a single one that you change all the time). I do use IDE for certain languages (yes, java), but I think it has more to deal with the verbosity and inherited complexity (chicken and egg here) then I would attribute to size alone.

The bottom line is, having been using IDE and not IDE for different projects for a long time, I would default to not using IDE if I could. It's not like I'm pathologically averse to the idea of IDE, in fact I use it daily. I just think not using the IDE has benefits both on speed for certain projects, and clarity and skill growth for others.