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I belong to a 100+ team working on the Chromium code base; a project having 150+ third party sub-projects, all tied up by and build in the command line with a few build tools like GN and ninja.

Not one in my team use an IDE because they die merely trying to index everything. Everyone uses a simple editor of choice: Emacs, Vim, VS Code and Notepad++ are the popular choices. Everyone has at least two Bash/CMD instances open.

The systems programming world is a different one unlike the web programming world where everything is small and self contained for an IDE and GUI.




I tried getting sublime to work with a 60k file code base, I got the indexer down to 20k but the CPU usage of the indexing process was always at 100% when building (diagnostics showed it wasn't doing any index db changes) even though I filtered out most of the build cruft, third party code, and useless sub directories.

Vim with cscope/ctags is the best of both worlds. Index your project once -- no penalty when building. Symbolic searching is a must have on any large code base (declaration, usage, etc).


Is VS Code not an IDE at this point?


It more or less is, my use case for it is more or less Notepad++ with Intellisense and a few of the marketplace apps. I like it though, it's lightweight and I've used it as a text editor a few times.

That being said, my most used is probably either regular Notepad or Notepad++ in a Windows env.




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