code browsing, refactoring, auto completion in Emacs

Question

I recently switched to Emacs and still finding my way through it. I code in C++ and was wondering what tools out there extend Emacs to support code browsing (finding a symbol etc), refactoring and code completion. I have heard of:

• cedet
• etags
• cscope

But I'm so confused about what I need. Some places say that cedet provides all of the functionality but other places say that I need to invoke etags for cedet to work properly.

Can someone clear this up for me? Do I need all of these tools?

Answer 1

Maybe you will find my article about Cedet useful. Cedet has support for etags, gtags, cscope and other tools.

But refactoring is missing. You may need to look into the Xrefactory tool (but it isn't free)