The modern IDEs I am thinking of are Visual Studio (appropriately tarted up with Visual Assist) and Xcode. Yes, unoriginal, I know, but what can I say? Anyway,

The modern IDEs I am thinking of are Visual Studio (appropriately tarted up with Visual Assist) and Xcode. Yes, unoriginal, I know, but what can I say? Anyway, people always tell me these two are rubbish, so I assume everything else must be at least somewhat better. Perhaps I was guilty of hyperbole, and "magic" is excessive. But stuff that comes out of the box in the above IDEs, and in its out-of-the-box state is slicker, easier to use and requiring less effort on one's own part than in emacs: - Symbol browsing with search by substring, so you can leap to a symbol knowing only its name or part thereof; - Project file browsing with search by substring, so you can open a file by name or part thereof; - Pretty reliable jump-to-symbol with context sensitivity (so p.xyz, say, will take you to the right xyz), so you can find something given a valid mention of it in the source code; - Popup code completion without my having to do anything funny or wait for the next build; - Refactoring - OK, actually my use of refactoring tools could probably be done in emacs without making me want to die, but I know people who like 'lift method' and all that other junk, which would be basically a manual process in emacs. I tried a couple of things to try and bring this stuff to emacs. M-x imenu, M-x ctags, CEDET and ido-mode are the ones that stick in my mind. None of them were up to much, though I wrote some helper functions to combine ide-mode and imenu, and I was somewhat pleased with the result. Then I upgraded emacs, and they stopped working. I took this as a sign, and didn't bother rewriting them. I don't use emacs for C/C++ any more.