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my number one complaint, whether it be with eclipse, textmate, vim, emacs, whatever, is the clumsiness of going from one file to another and then back to the original

Emacs has a stack for this. Jump to related definition with M-., jump back to where you were before with M-∗. One keystroke is not exactly "clumsy", IMHO.

I, like other posters, would be really psyched if you could have some kind of MVC opener which would automagically open all the code files using a certain view.

I just open all files in the project with `eproject-open-all-project-files`. Then I can iswitchb between them. (Of course, there are lots of extensions that don't require you to have the files open to easily navigate to them; eproject, anything, ido, etc.)

Have a look at the 'Leo' editor, it has views on your source using 'cloned' nodes. It even allows you to group all the code around a bug and a fix together, document the whole thing and never move any of the original code around.

It's a pretty neat literate programming tool.

Leo is really nice and I've used it on real projects to refactor and study my architecture.

I'd actually say that Leo is horrible except for the one feature that makes it amazing (outlines). I find myself wanting to implement outlines in Vim but knowing I never will.

That's a fair assessment too. I don't use Leo for the general-purpose work and new code because it gets in the way when you know what you want to write. But it does work well if you need to learn what a large, spread out body of code is doing. Just realigning the position of code helps to spot some previously hidden repetition.

I would probably use it more if I wrote some scripts to autogen the outlines for entire codebases.

Take a look at Code Browser: http://code-browser.sf.net too - it does outlining in a minimalistic way that I really like.

For those who like leo/literate programming, have a look at code-browser:

http://tibleiz.net/code-browser/

More powerful overall. It implements elastic tabstops too! Little unknown gem. good for outlining a book/paper also.

Mylyn.

Without downplaying the possible effect of the presented technology, you really should not need to poke through to find stuff or use the mouse to move around...

Vim (or Emacs) along with ctags == awesome. Go to any definition, open file if it was not yet open. Buffer stacks, split windows.

Wow, ctags. I've been a vim user for a while but haven't been using ctags! Now I shall use it forevermore.

I also like using tabs, so I found the following mapping to make tag lookups open in a new tab instead of a new buffer:

  map \gt :tab split<CR>:exec("tag ".expand("<cword>"))<CR>

It has a few kinks, but it works well and I think it complements my \tt, \tn, \tp commands. (Tabnew, tabnext, tabprev.)

I think there's some really interesting stuff here that should be leveraged. What I like best is that it really focuses your mind on the task at hand. You don't spend a lot of time looking through large amounts of code just to find a few things.

I wouldn't like the UI directly as presented, but there's certainly a starting point there.

Really though, don't know what kind of programmer would accept line wrap on code. Urf.

> Really though, don't know what kind of programmer would accept line wrap on code. Urf.

I'd happily accept syntactically- and semantically-aware line wrap, if someone could do it and get it right. Combine that with elastic tabs that actually work, add a standard set of layout rules that gives good results, and provide bullets to shoot anyone who thinks coding standards should be about whether the space goes before or after that `*` when declaring a pointer, and I'm sold. :-)

> my number one complaint, whether it be with eclipse, textmate, vim, emacs, whatever, is the clumsiness of going from one file to another and then back to the original.

Yes, that was something bugged me for a long time so I wrote an Emacs package to fix it. http://breadcrumbemacs.sourceforge.net/

I'm curious about what exactly didn't you like about moving between files in vim?

CTRL-^ just toggles back and forth, with ctags you get one-keystroke movement up and down the function call stack, and you can jump to various buffers with ":b partial_filename", or ":b<number>" if you remember the specific number, or ":blast".

In emacs, going back to the previous file is simply C-x b RET...

As an emacs user, I find this entertaining. You are correct in that once you know how to use emacs it's trivial. However, anyone that doesn't know the emacs key bindings will see that it's "simply hitting something that looks like 4 random keystrokes to any non-emacs user."