I'm not saying a shell isn't useful. I don't use an IDE for any of my git workflow (I actually find git to be poor on Windows, which is a good reason to choose

I'm not saying a shell isn't useful. I don't use an IDE for any of my git workflow (I actually find git to be poor on Windows, which is a good reason to choose Linux); but for navigating the code. Shell utilities that deal with plain text often get the nuance wrong, because they don't have the full syntax tree to deal with. Mostly you're using regular expressions; which often get you close but not quite right. For navigation, people often would use cscope/ctags something else anyway; and text searching often isn't as good as a semantically aware find. I don't use an IDE beyond vim for my C++ work; but am considering clion. So far I'm not entirely convinced, it doesn't handle some of the more complex C++ constructs correctly.