I don't, ever, even think about lag in between :w and :ma .. these things just plain work. For everything else, there's 'cscope -R -s /usr/include #&etc'.

For pure C/C++ projects, I use cscope+vim+make on the rPi. For Lua projects, just vim .. and a few judicious 'watch ./ make' style sub-cmds in another shell.

GUI editors are not your friend, I accept that. But there is more beneath the hood than such a dilemna as not enough RAM to load bitmaps ..