You're right, of course. I guess what I'm really longing for is ease-of-use and ease-of-setup. For ease-of-use, the default action is navigation (just like reading a web page) so that I can drill-down and mentally execute code not unlike being in a debugger. For ease-of-setup, I don't necessarily want to clone something, create tag files, and possibly install a language mode... I just want to read.
Perhaps this seems a bit lazy, but I think of reading code as similar to reading books or articles: not everything is worth the same level of investment. Yes, some things I want to really get into, and get dirty running (or writing) tests, refactoring, and commenting. Other things I want to just (passively) read or even skim.
I feel like a full IDE, or the recommendations in the parent article, lean toward the in-depth study that I don't find appropriate for every task.
(It's been 20 years since I last used Visual Studio, so my understanding of its capabilities is obviously dated.)
Can anyone recommend good tools for reading code? I find github.com to be very klunky for this purpose, and even emacs/vim make the task much more troublesome than it could be. Is there such a thing as a "read-only IDE" anywhere out there? (Ideally features would include click-to-definition, navigate back and forth, add bookmarks and annotations.)