I usually use vim+screen+make(gdb, gcc...). Plus a really hairy .screenrc that does some magic to put running command lines in the status line (so i can see wh

I usually use vim+screen+make(gdb, gcc...). Plus a really hairy .screenrc that does some magic to put running command lines in the status line (so i can see which screen has vim foo.c running). But the key is to not have 10+ files open at once. You're using vim so opening and closing vim instances is no big deal. I usually only have two or three source files open at a time that way i know exactly where each one is. This limits my screen tabs to only 4-5 which is pretty manageable.