Comment by jcalvinowens

I do most of my programming work in vim on a machine with no X. I will literally use grep to look for definitions, and it really amuses me now much this horrifies people. At the risk of sounding like an ass... I'm exceptionally productive, it works for me.

I feel very strongly that the key to getting things done in the real world is the ability to identify simple tractable solutions to complex problems, not some ability to crank out mountains of code by brute force.

If I'm constantly needing to search for definitions, that tells me I've failed to spend enough time studying the codebase before trying to patch it. I'll shelve what I'm trying to do, and go study the code for awhile before trying again. How can I possibly hope to see the optimal solution, when I clearly don't even understand the basics of how the code is organized!?

I use tools like cscope when jumping into something completely new to me, but I find they quickly stop being useful once I've gotten to know the project.

Spending hours to days studying a large complex codebase is a necessary prerequisite to successfully working with it, IMHO. Shiny IDE tools can juice short term productivity by allowing you to brute force through code you haven't taken the time to understand, but that costs you a lot in the long term.

Of course, you can use the IDE tools for code study: I'm not saying they're inherently bad.