Probably because you complain about editors not being able to do such and so while vim can do such and so easily.

Not so much using it as just going on about it tediously. Never invite a quasimodal interface to a dinner party.

It is kind of obsolete now that Vim features native intellisense, but it is still pretty powerful.

By the way, I thought you were talking about marks (using m[a-zA-Z] to mark a position in the file, then '[a-zA-Z] to go to the mark).

If you have set your paths correctly (set path=/usr/include,.,../include or similar, so that they include all your headers) you can use [i to see the declaration of a variable, and CTRL-W i to go to the declaration in a new window with the original Vim parsing (without the tags).

Now that you already got tagging working, add set tags=~/.vim/stdtags,./tags,../tags,tags to your vimrc file, then create the tags, putting the tag file in one of the previously mentioned positions (for example, ./tags or ../tags). Then in the vimrc add autocmd FileType c set omnifunc=ccomplete#Complete to bind the file type with the omnifunction to use. Finally, just declare an object and try to access its members, if you are using gvim a popup will appear with the members.

Omni requires ctags to work (adding all the ctags code into the Vim executable would be a waste of time). However, it natively supports CSS and other types. Check :help ft-c-omni for more information.

(Edited: Maybe this old guide helps you?)

You probably have a shit load of dev packages installed

Do a <i>du -h usr/include to weight the directory. I got around 50mb, which generates a 75mb systags file. You probably passed too many arguments to ctags, generating a lot of information (that may not be necessary).

(Edited:

Which version are you using? It looks you are missing ccomplete.vim. Try locate ccomplete to see if you have it somewhere, I had it at /usr/share/vim/vim72/autoload/ccomplete.vim.)

Guh, I simply do not understand the use of spaces for indenting. At all. Any proper editor should be able to emulate spaces/set whatever spacing you want/etc for tabs. Using spaces forces your shitty indentation styles on others, makes file sizes larger (negligible though), etc. And if python benefits from using spaces vs. tabs, then it's a shitty language.

Technically, there's no reason a powerful editor couldn't also switch between space-based indentation. You should be able to say "This file was created with 4-space based indentation. Convert them to tabs."

I used to agree with tabs (and really the difference in indentation width sort of scares me about using spaces, though it should still be convertible most of the time), but I have just found tabs to be disorganized when it comes to alignment. Sure, you can use tabs to indent and spaces to align, but in practice I've found it insufficient. I'm hoping spaces corrects that problem. I don't dislike tabs, but I'm hoping moving to entirely spaces will be more organized and portable.

I don't even remember why spaces are recommended (though not required) for indentation in Python, but I remember accepting it as best practice. The interpreter even has command-line arguments to warn (-t) or even error (-tt) when tabs are used for indentation. Python is by no means my favorite language, though I appreciate its differences.

[bamccaig@rufus trunk]$ cat ~/.vimrc
:set autoindent
:set expandtab
:set hidden
:set ignorecase
:set nowrap
:set number
:set ruler
:set shiftwidth=4
:set softtabstop=4
:set tabstop=4
":set tags+=~/.vim/systags,~/.vim/tags,../tags,./tags
:set tags+=../tags,./tags

:autocmd FileType c set omnifunc=ccomplete
:autocmd FileType cpp set omnifunc=cppcomplete
:autocmd FileType cs set omnifunc=cscomplete
:autocmd FileType css set omnifunc=csscomplete
:autocmd FileType d set omnifunc=dcomplete
:autocmd FileType javascript set omnifunc=javascriptcomplete
:autocmd FileType php set omnifunc=phpcomplete
:autocmd FileType python set omnifunc=pythoncomplete
:autocmd FileType xml set omnifunc=xmlcomplete
:autocmd FileType xsl set omnifunc=xslcomplete

"set term=ansi
"set term=color_xterm
syntax on

:colorscheme bam
":colorscheme bam-dark
[bamccaig@rufus trunk]$ 

(As you can see I may have gotten carried away with the omnifunc bits... Most of which I'm unsure about their correctness...)

I see using spaces as only of relevant if the position of text in columns is important, such as tabular data. But for coding, I couldn't care less if tab is 4 characters on one computer and 8 on the other - you can still see the code layout as it was intended.

Or think of it in this way: If you use tab then you can set your preferred viewing method. If you use spaces that's all you get.

I think the pattern emerging here is those using modern IDE's use tab, and those using text based unix editors prefer spaces.

While I agree with you for simple indentation, when it comes to alignment things get a little bit more complicated. Since most people have their editors configured to not show whitespace, it isn't obvious when you accidentally tab code into alignment.

--->--->really_long_function_name1(really_long_argument1,
--->--->--->                       really_long_argument2);
//      ^ Oops, that should be 4 spaces instead of a tab, but with invisible
//        whitespace you wouldn't notice.

When that code is opened in an editor whose tabstop isn't 4 the code won't line up properly anymore. It's not a show stopper (I don't have any really useful examples to show right now), but if you're obsessive about formatting like I am it's frustrating fighting with it. There's also the fact that tabs typically display as 8 characters wide in text terminals so if you spend a lot of time in them (and you should ) then you'll also find that spaces work better for things printed to the terminal.

I also find myself fighting with indentation in JavaScript, where I often use lots of JSON and getting it to line up properly with tabs and spaces combined is often a struggle.

I use both (I develop with Visual Studio at j0rb), but I prefer working in text terminals. Even at work though (as I said, with JavaScript, for example) I still struggle to keep alignment right.

Yeah, that bothers me too. Another gripe is trailing whitespace. Fortunately, with a powerful editor it's relatively easy to get rid of both automatically.

:%s/\s\+$//g

Obviously not unique to Vim, though I would say that of the editors that I use regularly it's easiest to do in Vim. I think Visual Studio used to do this automatically, but recent iterations don't seem to have that feature by default anymore.

Mmmmmz, automatic.

func! DeleteTrailingWS()
  exe "normal mz"
  %s/\s\+$//ge
  exe "normal `z"
endfunc

autocmd BufWrite * :call DeleteTrailingWS()

^[1]

So you prefer:

if(a){

to:

if(a)
{

then? Because you know you shouldn't just delete the opening curly braces?