etags didn't help me much with the C++ code I worked on. It took me to the right place a lot of the time, but between the macro-heavy C code I inherited and th

etags didn't help me much with the C++ code I worked on. It took me to the right place a lot of the time, but between the macro-heavy C code I inherited and the modern C++ code I was writing, it wasn't reliable enough for me to put up with. The same thing was true of all the C++ IDEs I tried, though. No tool in the world except gcc could handle our C++ code. We even had a file that defeated Emacs. It was a huge file that used a logging macro that included a leading parenthesis but no closing parenthesis, so there were hundreds of lines like this: LOG "A log message", logFile); Result: Emacs locked up when you opened the file, presumably while trying to colorize the syntax. Whenever language support is that poor, text editors and other Unix text-munging tools win hands-down. All I had to do in Emacs was disable the cc mode hooks and fix up the file using query-replace-regexp. IntelliJ has the equivalent of query-replace-regexp, but it's clunky and bothersome enough that I went from using it as a daily tool in Emacs to almost never using it in IntelliJ. That's pretty much what happened to me with Emacs' IDE features, so it's kind of a symmetrical situation.