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Source Insight lets you browse source code - very useful for largish codebases. It's much quicker than findstr or grep because it has an index rather than having to search the whole thing. It's not free of course but I'd never go back to findstr having used it.

Also, Source Insight is still in business. $240 a seat, and it's a source editor, not an IDE. I think it's a steal at that price, but then I don't undervalue my time, or over-value the worth of editors/IDEs that require you to "invest" hours of time to learn hundreds of macros and shortcuts.

I'm sure that people trying to sell crappy half assed editors will be having a tough time of it, but there is a market: they're just not good enough to compete in it.

See http://www.sourceinsight.com./ It's not free, but it's great.

Basically it has a smart parser/indexer and it builds and maintains an internal database.

Once that is done, it lets you easily jump around the codebase (jump to any class/function/variable definition/prototype), find all references to something (not just simple textual searches but actual qualified conceptual references), etc. I would never work on any sizable C++/C# project without it.

The UI is a bit unorthodox but once you learn to customize it to your liking it's extremely efficient and drastically speeds both learning and coding.

Source Insight is a ide/editor that consumes and parses a couple dozen languages and full text indexes results to allow very fast searching, definitions navigation and class diagrams on the fly. You don't have to be able to compile to code to index it. Its not free/open source but there's a trial version and I've found it's worth the money. http://www.sourceinsight.com/

How would you compare "Understand" to "Source Insight" ? I had never heard of either before today, but on reading Dgoldman's comment http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=422996&cid=22095314 [slashdot.org] I am so impressed by the screenshots http://www.sourceinsight.com/features.html [sourceinsight.com] that I think it will be worth a try, the visual call-graphs look outstanding, unless "Understand" is enough better to be worth twice-the-price.

How would you compare CodeSurfer to "Source Insight" ? I had never heard of either before today, but on reading Dgoldman's comment http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=422996&cid=22095314 I am so impressed by the screenshots http://www.sourceinsight.com/features.html that I think it will be worth a try, the visual call-graphs look outstanding, unless Codesurfer has them too and I missed it somehow.

for a win* developer source insight( http://www.sourceinsight.com/ ) may be what you are looking for -- not free but well priced; not a full ide but its truly the best c/++ code editor ive ever used. its simply incredible to me how fast one can explore and move through code using it. one brilliant thing about it is that its setup so you really never need the mouse -- which means your hands dont have to leave the keyboard ever ( emacsy like in that respect ) the only downside of source insight is its symbol auto-completion isnt so great. visual studio for its glitchy ness is still generally faster on that front. if you dont mind typing tho and just want to know the name / case / parameters of the symbol then si's context window does the trick just fine.

http://www.sourceinsight.com/

Use it, love it. The UI is rather ugly, but it is the best damned source navigation tool available for Windows today. (Link)

I'm probably a big dork, but I've never seen this feature before, and I'm sure of some great uses for it!

I thought that was standard functionality for a stack trace in an IDE? Visual Studio has done this for years, though without the hand/underline highlighting. IMHO, if you're going to put a stack trace in an IDE, this is a required feature. Otherwise, why would I use the IDE for debugging in the first place?

And just to pimp my own favorite IDE (well, it's not so much an IDE as it is a full-featured editor and program analyzer, but that's fine by me since I do builds via the commandline) is Source Insight. The killer functionality here is the ability to jump through relationships in the code without having to compile. The editor will keep track of relationships, so even if you have half-written code that doesn't quite compile yet, you can still browse through it and follow the flow. Plus, it's easily extendable for other programming languages (out of the box, version 3.5 supports C/C++, C#, Java, ASM, HTML, XML, Perl, Batch script, JScript, VB, VBScript, and a lot more, and there are modules available for SQL and others). Let's see Eclipse or Visual Studio keep track of thousands of files in a large project (I've used SI to keep track of relationships in upwards of 9000 files at one time, with anywhere between 50 to 100 of the files open at any given time, without any performance issues at all).

Source Insight isn't free, but the price is reasonable ($250, and you can get a site license if you're a company) and there's a 30-day free trial so you can evaluate whether it's worth $250 to you. Even if you don't like it, it's certainly worth checking out. I guess I should probably also note that it's Windows-only.

It's sooooo painful to debug on Unix. It makes me want to kill children. At work, I use Source Insight for my source browsing, and VS for debugging.

If you can spare the cash, I suggest you get Source Insight--it has a parser that looks up symbols while you work. You'll fly through source code like a mutha. There is a free trial version to download and try. If you do, you'll say "Holy Crap!"

I have found that just like editors a question like this really comes down to individual taste.

With the above paragraph in mind I would recommend SourceInsight as a good development tool. Unfortuanetly it lacks integrated compilation or debugging options (and thus might not truly be considered an IDE).

Some of its highlights are dynamic type resolution, syntax formating, a dynamic context window, team programming support, fast access to large projects etc. etc.

The only downside is that it is a Windows only program. But if you find yourself doing much work on a windows system it is worth taking a look at:

SourceInsight homepage