One other thing no other tool does (AFAIK) is that you can get a "call hierarchy" for a function or any variable and it's laid out as a tree and you can expand each node to trace the calls. This makes understanding the code and refactoring faster by an order of magnitude.
I have avoided Eclipse for years because of cpu/memory usage, but ever since I got a computer with Intel i7 CPU and 16GB of RAM, I have completely switched to Eclipse because it makes me so much more productive than any other environment I tried.
Whenever the point is over a word in a C++ codebase, e.g. FooSystem, it will be underlined, and you can click on it and jump to definition, show all references, etc. Then if you type Foo, CompanyMode should pop up a dialog box that will autocomplete FooManager.
I think you can also install a fuzzy matching package for CompanyMode which allows you to type e.g. "FSy" to complete "FooSystem", though I may be confusing Helm and CompanyMode.
You may also want to check out the Projectile package. It's for large project navigation, and I think it helps with automatically running ETags / GTags on an as-needed basis.
I wrote an article that should be introduction to CEDET: http://alexott.net/en/writings/emacs-devenv/EmacsCedet.html - maybe it will be useful
Rtags is a also nice alternative. Both packages work as daemons outside emacs that read your compile commands.
For rails projects I wrote a script that kicks off ctags with the following options. "ctags --tag-relative -Rf.git/tags.$$ --exclude=.git --exclude=log --exclude=tmp --exclude=public --languages=ruby --languages=javascript `bundle show --paths` $MY_RUBY_HOME ."
I'd wager there is a better way. That's just the way I roll.
Plugin 'majutsushi/tagbar'
Plugin 'xolox/vim-easytags'
Plugin 'xolox/vim-misc'
nnoremap <silent> <Leader>b :TagbarToggle<CR>
Now you can have an outline of the file you're working on in a small pane to the right. You can use this to navigate or see what arguments a function needs (or what attributes a class has). Whenever you save, ctags are automatically generated so you never have to worry about setting that up. ctrl+] will bring directly to the definition, including if it is in another file entirely. Use ctrl+T to go back to where you came. More often than not, I use this not because I forgot what the code says, but because I made an alteration to how I wanted a function or class to behave and I need to go back and change a line or two.
Free Software: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
>how is hosting stuff on Github antithetical to it?
Github is s a proprietary cloud service: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se...
> Dumb Jump uses The Silver Searcher ag (and falls back to grep) ... [and] a set of regular expressions
If you're going to install ag, you might as well install universal-ctags[1], a revival of ctags with many improved and new parsers. It allowed me to discard my C and javascript ctags config entirely.
Combined with gutentags[2] you have a "just works" and "Less Dumb" setup.
I have rtags set up, but it periodically stops working (too many parsing errors, indexer crashes, etc) or it is just slow, then I fall back to ag. It can search a ~1M lines C++ codebase in seconds (and you can start browsing the results while the search is in progress of course). Of couse it also works if you do not have a project setup, or you just switched to a wildly diverged git branch.
I'm definitely going to try this dumb-jump.
Respond to this comment if you need pointers on how to set things up.
BTW, did you know that you can just do README.org and github parses it? I noticed that you have org file checked in, but README is in md. For example see https://github.com/kozikow/keyremaplinux .
Why does dumb-jump-go want me to save my files before jumping?
i notice one of the supported languages is go -- if you're doing much go, i recommend installing godef and using go-mode.el. no tags files or anything like that, and works perfectly well for jumping to definition.
(i also highly recommend gorename and guru.)