irony-mode

I'm writing less C++ than I used to recently, but here's the basic setup I use: 1) Emacs prelude w/ helm enabled everywhere -https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude 2) Irony-mode for auto completion. Since you're using Cmake, you can just add CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS to your invocation to output the needed metadata for completion to work. - https://github.com/Sarcasm/irony-mode 3) helm-flycheck for syntax checking https://github.com/yasuyk/helm-flycheck 4) For jump to definition I generally just use helm-ag (grep) , I never actually got this working to my satisfaction despite trying a few things like rtags (slow, unstable) and clang-ctags (promising but annoying to set up at the time). 5) For formatting I usually just enable clang-format on save w/ something like this (requires clang-format mode installed): (add-hook 'c++-mode-hook

... and Emacs really is an IDE; the distinction between it and GUI IDEs has more to do with user interface than any limitation of Emacs. e.g. live libclang-based code completion for Emacs: https://github.com/Sarcasm/irony-mode

People can and do use libclang for AST info in the same manner that you're talking about: https://github.com/Sarcasm/irony-mode

I work on a large C++ codebase in emacs. I find emacs keybindings and extensibility (via elisp) far superior to any IDE - and I have tried Eclipse, CLion (IDEA for C++), Code/Blocks and Netbeans. For C/C++ specifically, the state of code analysis in emacs has greatly improved due to clang. For example, I get full auto-complete (including for variables declared 'auto') in emacs with irony-mode [0] for code completion, flycheck-irony [1] for on-the-fly syntax checking, and I get jump to definition/find references/etc via clang-ctags [2]. I assume vim has similar extensions. [0] - https://github.com/Sarcasm/irony-mode [1] - https://github.com/Sarcasm/flycheck-irony [2] - https://github.com/drothlis/clang-ctags

As an emacs C++ user YouCompleteMe is the only VIM plugin that makes me jealous. I want the code navigation and completion you get with VS or XCode but within emacs. I know there are other plugins that try to do this, but as the author mentioned, all the repeated works leads to an overall mediocre results in most cases. Maybe the front end of something like irony-mode [0] can be adapted to use the YouCompleteMe backend. [0] - https://github.com/Sarcasm/irony-mode