[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.