cquery

I think this isn't about unix tools or philosophies. It's about the fact that for a very long time these big monolithic projects didn't really allow any integrations. Vim didn't allow integration because there was no way interface to it, and it's not an easy codebase. Neovims work is proof of that. C++ compilers didn't allow integration because they were big monstrous projects and when you need to do proper c++ indexing you basically need to compile the whole project. For C++ this changed with clang and even for clang it took a lot of iterations and bugs inside of libclang to allow for this capability. Naturally one of the best C++ IDE's was therefore also by the producer of their own compiler (Visual Studio). These boundaries are slowly fading, so these arguments are kinda moot. A few examples: https://clang.llvm.org/extra/clangd/ https:

Yes, I have used Eclipse and IntelliJ. Have you used cquery for example (https://github.com/cquery-project/cquery)? In my experience performance is excellent and it can even be used with large code bases like Chromium. Accuracy is perfect since it uses the same information the compiler has.

I haven't used CLion so can't comment on that, but I have tried a few other alternatives. QT Creator [1] has always worked very well for me. If you want to stick with vim there is YouCompleteMe[2]. You can also try using any editor that supports the LanguageServer protocol [3] and then use a C++ language server to provide cross references, hierarchies, completion and more. Microsoft has a language server plugin for vscode [4], there is also CCLS [5], cquery [6] or clangd [7] which can be made to work with both vim and emacs. [1] https://www.qt.io/download [2] https://valloric.github.io/YouCompleteMe/ [3] https://langserver.org/ [4] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod... [5] https://github.com/MaskRay/ccls [6] https://github.com/cquery-project/cquery [7] https://clang.llvm.org/extra/clangd.html

I've been happy with https://github.com/abingham/emacs-ycmd – you have to make a .ycm_extra_conf.py per project, but that's about it. I also see people recommending https://github.com/cquery-project/cquery You might want to try asking https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/ask or https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/ though

Visual Studio Code + cquery is also very good! https://github.com/cquery-project/cquery