[tallpapab]

Thanks for the reply. ctags is a great tool, but it is not as easy as an IDE. IDEs keep track without my having to explicitly rebuild the tag data base. IDEs have plugins for different languages. The dynamic flagging of errors and warnings without having to explicitly compile is a time saver. Refactoring tools can also save quite a bit of time. Renaming a function becomes trivial in an IDE.

Of course, there are many things for which vim and bash (":%! sort -n" anyone?) are far superior to an IDE. I tend to use both.

[NickPollard]

There are some things IDEs do better, but these Unix tools give you more choice.

It should be pretty simple to add a hook to vim to rebuild the tags whenever you save a buffer, for example. That should take the load off your mind. The issue with IDEs I find is that this stuff is automatic and no way to turn it off, and then I find at the worst time that Visual Studio is crawling to a halt as it runs a load of complex parsing in the background on my 500k lines of C++, just when all I wanted to do was write some code.

Think of it as separation of concerns - you wouldn't write a program where all the code was in one tightly bound monolithic system. Why do so for your tools?

[tallpapab]

As quickly as you can turn your back on Visual Studio. (Sorry, just kidding ... sort of.) Eclipse and NetBeans are a couple IDEs (there are others) that use a module system to build what can appear to be a monolith. Look into OSGi which is an attempt to standardize modularizing GUIs. Of course, I haven't run these tools on 500k lines of C++ just half that of java code. P.S. I used "find . -name \*.java | xargs cat | wc -l" to count the lines of java code. I did not use the IDE for that, giggle.

[truncate]

Plus ctags isn't really that smart, or you can say the way it is used. For example I have a struct "foo" that has different independent declarations in several files in my source tree. Whenever, I would try to open that tag, list of all tags would show up regardless the files included in the current source files. This is quite irritating.

Another not-so-smart feature is auto completion (in C++ at least) and refactoring.

However I can live with these missing features as once you get used to something like Vim or Emacs, its quite frustrating to work on bloated IDE's.

[tallpapab]

How does ctags do when a variable name is repeated in a different scope? I do rather wish for a really good vim type replacement for the editor in NetBeans though. I keep inadvertently entering vim motion commands in my java text - sigh.

[falcolas]

It picks the "best" one (typically the one in the scope of your current file), and lets you change which one to go to, without ruining your tag stack.

For example, if I Ctrl-] over `open`, and it pops me to the wrong one, I can then type :ts and pick the proper entry (typically with info about the file, type, and container). I can then Ctrl-t back to the previous context as normal.

[Symmetry]

Well, if you're using ctags through vim it guesses by default, or you can use :ts to get a list of the possibilities. Not ideal, I know, but often good enough.