Comment by lanstin

This is one of my standard interview questions, how do you familiarize yourself with a multi-million line code base with partially correct partial documentation (in addition to generated documentation). Looking for interesting tooling, and stepping thru the framework code to see how it all comes together (and enough concrete details to verify the claimed work history).

I'm not sure about the advantage to seeing all the code at once for understanding it. Surely for refactoring or massive editing, but to encode it into your brain, I feel the crucial thing is more abstract than actually seeing the code.

I personally find the large screen is something that's more useful when I am moving between different low-concentration tasks (confluence, slack, teams, emacs, whatever) but for deep problem solving/thinking, just 1 window I can see everything completely with a full-screen emacs is more conducive. I assume other editors than emacs would have this same facility. Extremely rapid answering of different questions about the code via LSP type facilities is more key than seeing a bunch of text at once, so I can follow the flow of my thoughts. Sometimes, when I'm trying to make sure that 2 or 3 functions have the same flow/logic (yeah, haven't found the abstraction to replace them with) I'll want a big side-by-side comparison of 2 or 3 places at once.

This ability to follow into third party code you use was one of the initial attractions of Gentoo - you can build all from source, keep source and symbols around, and edit/trace the code for anything on the system. Reading a lot of code I think makes my own code better.