I just want a text editor with good intelligent c++: code completion, call tree generation, jump to declaration/definition and syntax highlighting - that works on the command line so I can use it over ssh.
A good intelligent code editing would either require a good pile of hacks or a completely different approach.
Common "text code editors" don't understand a thing about the code they edit. They're just supplemented with ton of hacks that produce meaningful result in acceptably high number of cases (like regex-based highlighters) but still don't have "real" intelligence towards the content of their buffers.
And with ever-growing number of hacks the thing's unlikely to be small or low on dependencies. You'll end up with another emacs/vim/etc - a fairly small cores, and then a scripting or external tool execution support to do highlighting, parsing, context-aware searching, refactoring etc etc to make them useful for code editing. (And then why bother when we have emacs and vim already?)
And, well, if they don't work, it's certainly easier to patch their hacks or pile even more hacks, rather than trying to redo everything from a clean slate.
No and I'm not suggesting they reinvent the wheel either. I also don't care if it's a "common text editor" either. It can be a full blown IDE for all I care. I just want it to work correctly and in the command line so I can use it over ssh.
I seriously doubt that there is one that works well for C++ development. Even if there was it would only work with thier own server and I wouldn't have control over updates. I simply want more control over the tools I'm relying on than what they'd provide.
In theory that would work but in practice I've found that they still don't quite work correctly.
Some need to compile the program to work. (So they can't work if the code has compile time errors) Some still don't retrieve all the correct candidates for autocompletion.
Also, it's been awhile since I've tried a clang based plugin but I can't recall any of them controlling the syntax highlighting (eg. Show false #ifdef sections similar to comments) or providing a call tree or jump to caller feature.
