As a Vim user, the comparisons to Ctags and cscope were informative.
And the list of supported languages is impressive! Awk, Dos batch, COBOL, C, C++, C#, Erlang, Fortran, Java, JavaScript, Lisp, Lua, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Matlab, OCaml, Scheme, Tcl, TeX, Verilog, Vhdl and Vim.
The fancy language support is provided by exuberant ctags, so look into that if that excites you. As for cscope, GNU global is very similar; it's a bit slower for some things and a bit faster for others. Global can only find references, not callers/callees like cscope can. And the Debian maintainer of GNU Global thinks that the GNU Global maintainer is an idiot, and a consequence of this is that on Debian and derived distros the GNU Global package is ancient. But cscope is so similar, it doesn't really matter. Oh, and the gtags-cscope frontend global gives you is pretty much compatible with cscope, so any frontend that uses cscope will just work with gtags-cscope.
Heh? That post says its show-me-where-foo-is-defined functionality is broken sometimes, but it doesn't show it (and presumably they never filed a bug upstream either). I compared the two at some point last year, and they did produce slightly different results, with cscope being slightly more correct about something, but I don't recall exactly; they were VERY similar.
But GNU Global is being maintained, while cscope was abandoned. With GNU Global, you can actually update your database without recreating your tag database again. This is very useful for editor integration when you finish editing a file and save it.
I have been using Global for about 6 years now. Mostly I use it in emacs (though at times I use the CLI version).
I use it in Linux and Windows. I mostly work on C/C++ (Linux kernel, Windows drivers etc) and also have used it for few C# projects (via exuberant ctags backend).
One real advantage I get: I switch platforms between Linux and Windows (the place I work for has both). So I use emacs in both platforms and same gtags customization works out of box in both platforms. This relieves me in learning/using new editor/tagging system for each platform.
I'm all for FOSS tools, and have (and still) use ctags / cscope (mainly in vim), however the best source code referencing tool I've ever used is Understand - https://scitools.com Yes, it's commercial, however it beats anything free that I've found so far.
But can it resolve method calls (in C++, or really any language) to the correct methods, rather than just listing all methods with the same name implemented for any class?
I doubt it, since this basically requires a C++ compiler and GLOBAL does not seem to have that. Yet that is what, after years now, I'm still looking for for Vim...
Incidentally I remember there was a work in progress code navigation system posted to HN semi-recently (written in Go?), but its name eludes me. Anyone want to point me to it? I'm curious how it's progressed since it was posted.
I use etags in Emacs to navigate our C source code, which is so much more effective than the brute force search I often see people use. I don't have as good a handle on our C++, C#, and Java, so I'll give this a try.
As a Vim user, the comparisons to Ctags and cscope were informative.
And the list of supported languages is impressive! Awk, Dos batch, COBOL, C, C++, C#, Erlang, Fortran, Java, JavaScript, Lisp, Lua, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Matlab, OCaml, Scheme, Tcl, TeX, Verilog, Vhdl and Vim.