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What Free IDE Do You Use?
postermmxvicom writes "I program only occasionally and mostly for personal interest. I went to update my favorite free IDE, Dev C++, yesterday and noticed that it had not been updated since 2005! I went looking for other free IDEs and came across Code::Blocks and Visual Studio Express. I work from a Windows machine, use C++, and make mostly console apps; but have written a few Windows apps and D3D or OpenGL apps. I wanted to know what free IDEs you use and recommend. What do you like about them? What features do they lack? What about them irritate you (and what do you do to work around these annoyances)? For instance, when I used Visual C++ 6.0 in college, there was an error in getline that had to be fixed, and the code indenting in DevC++ needed to be tweaked to suit my liking."
I don't mess with C++ often but I still use Dev C++. Code::blocks wouldn't even install on my machine(or maybe it did, but never started up without a fatal error, can't remember which) and Visual Studio Express is a monstrosity which will take 45 minutes to install tons of weird crap while making your monitor flicker. Visual Studio express also allows only one programming language.
Contrast those with Netbeans and Eclipse which are known as Java IDEs but can be configured with plugins and add-ons to do all kinds of stuff, including C/C++ development. I haven't tried either of the two for C/C++ but I believe that Eclipse would be a the good middle ground between Dev C++ and the bloated NetBeans.
Here's[PDF warning] a good place to start. Good luck.
I like Eclipse as an IDE because it supports many languages/modes and is very customizable. I mostly use it for Java, Perl and HTML/XML/CSS right now. There are MANY plugins and the context-aware help/auto-complete is very well done.
version 7.0 RC5 came out 2 months ago.
Wiki page with link
Free edition of Delphi.
Two options that have not come up yet. KDevelop 4 is shaping up really good, but I do not think it is actually working on win32/64 yet. The other is Qt Software's offer Qt creator which is also getting a good deal of praise. The latter is probably extra good if you use Qt... and if you don't, I would recommend at least looking at it, since it is a very nice LGPL library.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
You hit it in the summary. I program professionally. At work, I use gcc, xcode or msvs (depending naturally on the platform).
At home, for personal development on Windows in C++, nothing beats Visual Studio Express. It's lightweight, meaning they've trimmed out most of the stuff that you don't care about anyways for personal projects.
As much as it might pain the free software crowd, Microsoft has done a good job with Visual Studio Express.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
I swear by Eclipse - I mostly do Java these days though, but I do have it setup for C++, Perl and PHP as well. :-)
Good plug-in support - easy to install and update.. what's not to like?
Integrates with most versioning tools through plug-ins (CVS, SVN etc).
Runs on all platforms. It's great.
If anyone says Emacs or Vi they are insane and have never done 10k lines of code in a modern environment.
There's the thing, it's not about 'modern environment', pretty displays, or cute graphics. It's about writing good stuff and cuteness is just a distraction from that.
Both vi and emacs can handle files with 10k lines easily. Chances are they both can handle much longer files before swapping then any IDE.
I use Apple's Xcode with the Ada plug-in from www.macada.org
I use Eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/ for all my IDE needs. I have found that it works well on any platform (and with any language) that I find myself sitting behind (or coding in). Eclipse gets my vote mainly for its very wide language AND platform support.
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Notepad++ isn't really an IDE but it's probably the best c++ editor I've found for Windows. If you want a full blown IDE then Eclipse is probably your best bet. It's written in Java but with a little fiddling it's not too ugly. As for Dev-C++ it's probably lost support because it's written in Delphi of all things.
Years ago I worked mainly in MS Windows, and I used Dev-C++ as the free IDE, because it's fast and simple.
Then I switched to Linux. Tried KDevelop for a few days but didn't like it. Then discovered Kate, which can work as a sort of IDE, because you can open multiple documents, and open a console window at the bottom to type compile and run commands.
Then KDE4 was release and Kate suddenly was unusable for programming (due to ruined search function). And that's when I discovered Geany, which is really nice, it has the same functionality as Kate but is more clearly geared towards programmers.
Geany works great in Linux, I see that it's cross platform, so I guess you can also get it to work in Windows. But note that due to Windows not having the same compiler tools as Linux available by default, it might be handier in Windows to have something that comes with its own compiler like Dev-C++ :)
Express edition. Free of charge.
Try SharpDevelop if you ever decide to trade in C++ for C# and the .NET framework.
http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SharpDevelop
I'm not really a Microsoft platform coder any more, but I've used this one in the past and it's not bad. Basically a free (as in speech - LGPL) clone of VisualStudio.
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
Seriously? Swapping because of much larger files?
Even 50MB of pure source is inconceivable to me (someone might provide a good counterexample), and that's a tiny amount of the memory of any modern system.
I wasn't suggesting that source code comes in files 10k lines long. linzeal was suggesting it as a reason for IDE's being better than vi or emacs. I was ( trying to ) point out it was a silly argument for exactly the reasons you have said.
I've been using NetBeans lately for C/C++ development, and (for the most part) it has it's usual awesome editor features. Unfortunately, the C/C++ plugin only works with the Cygwin/MinGW development tools on Windows.
I'd say that it's most useful editing feature is it's code completion- it completes quite a few of the usual syntactical characters, and it enters them for you in a way that makes sense. Compare that to Eclipse, which only fills in (as far as I know) parenthesis and some brackets. Being accustomed to the completion NetBeans offers, I found the way Eclipse completes characters to be more frustrating than helpful.
For example, if you have this mostly-typed statement (')' autocompleted by editor):
...you might think that pressing the ';' key should make the cursor jump to the end and skip over the ')'. NetBeans will do the small things like this, where I haven't seen Eclipse do it.
some_function(something()[cursor])
I haven't used Eclipse as much as NetBeans, so I may have missed the "turn this feature on" checkbox, but I've always found NetBeans to be a more intuitive editor. I'm not an expert C/C++ programmer (Java is my main language), so I could just be making assumptions that may be true for one language but not another. Either way, its just my $0.02.
Review their web site. Microsoft Visual Studio Express is free.
Well, you would probably get more than just IDE with that, as TheIDE is quite tightly coupled with the U++ library (http://www.ultimatepp.org/L$www$uppweb$idess$en-us.html_3.png, http://www.ultimatepp.org/L$www$uppweb$idess$en-us.html_4.png), anyway, ide-wise:
- it has cool highlighting, including highlighting of C++ blocks and coloring parenthesis (see http://www.ultimatepp.org/L$www$uppweb$idess$en-us.html_2.png)
- its C++ code-parsing abilitites (for purposes of code-navigation and 'intelisense') are at the moment said to be better than CDT's or at par with Visual Studio, although the problem is that it parses only the project files (not 'external' headers) http://www.ultimatepp.org/L$www$uppweb$idess$en-us.html_5.png.
- if you are rebuilding large projects often, it has very fast build process. It uses two tricks, one widely known (using multiple CPU cores to launch compiler instances), one special (combining files to avoid header reparsing). In practice, on quadcore CPU, it can build up to 16 times faster than plain make.
- works in Win32 and X11.
But there is also a drawback for many users:
- as it adds a strong crossplatform modularity layer, it gets a lot of suffering getting used to it. Simply do not expect your usual Visual Studio copy...
Why is it nobody seems to know about the excellent CodeLite? Described as "a powerful open-source, cross platform IDE for the C/C++ programming languages (build and tested on Windows XP SP3, (K)Ubuntu 8.04, and Mac OSX 10.5.2)" see http://www.codelite.org/
I've worked on programs much larger than 10kloc in both Emacs and Netbeaans. I gave up on Netbeans and went back to Emacs because I was just so much more productive there -- even when working in (yuck) Java.
It's pretty modern these days, too. It has intelligent autocomplete, it has a class browser, it has jump-to-definition, it will tell me the type of the variable under the cursor, it does code folding, it does source-level debugging ... in fact, pretty much the only thing present in "modern" IDEs that Emacs doesn't have is a point-and-drool GUI designer, and that's fine by me because I don't design GUIs.
And it is far, far better at actually editing text than any IDE editor I've ever seen.
Also, it reads mail. :p
Vi is one editor every professional should know the basics of because it's very feature complete and versatile. Emacs is more specialized but I'm not knocking it. However if you're developing today, you need to move away from modal editors that have awful help systems and no menus. They simply don't encourage learning and get in your way if you're away from the editor for too long and have to try to remember obscure commands (or look them up!). Note they are EDITORS. An IDE does much much more. You should also be using IDEs and editors that support multiple languages. Gone are the days when a computer professional could afford to know just one or two languages. Who the hell wants to learn the quirks of different editors for each one?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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If anyone says Emacs or Vi they are insane and have never done 10k lines of code in a modern environment.
Hoping that I'm not about to start a flame war: why?
I assume you're qualified to make that statement, which means you know both emacs and vi very well. Whenever you think there's something $EDITOR can't do, you have (1) searched the web for that functionality; (2) asked in the relevant IRC channel(s); and (3) asked on mailing lists, news groups, forums and the like.
Let's see; they have (I'm most certain that I'm speaking about emacs, less certain about vi)
Uhmm... what more do you want? Especially for small 10k-line projects. Example: wminput, which translates wiimote events to uinput events, is 9236 lines (in wminput/**/*.[ch]; this doesn't include bluetooth or wiimote libraries).
I think that if you think 10k lines even begins to stretch the capabilities of emacs (or vi), you don't know either editor very well. And you can probably find people who'd point at me and laugh (and suggest I don't know the editors very well) when I suggest that 10m begins to stretch their capabilities ;-)
And I think they'd have a good case: at 10m lines, it's not a question of good editors but of good architectures. Good architectures will allow each developer to work on somewhere between 10 to 100 klocs at a time, not worrying about anything outside their slice of code (until they move on to their next project). [But this is wild conjecture, so take it with a bucketload of salt...]
* pronounced "a(rrrrrhhhhh)ida", like how Stallman pronounces the chi in "LaTeX" and "TeXinfo" or ch in "Bach". I'm not sure about spelling. Search Google tech talks for Bram Molenaar if you really want to know (and hey, it's a nice talk in its own right).
I have used Codeblocks for the last 3 years now. It was pretty good when I first started using it and their latest update to version 8.02 was just icing on the cake. Plus it uses the GNU compiler for windows which make the code pretty cross platform if you aren't using OS specific calls.
I've written console apps, graphical apps, compute games, to libraries that are being used at my university with this thing. Its basically everything nice about Visual Studio without all the bloat.
I used DevC++ for quite some time until I found out that it was out of date as well. Since then I've used Code::Blocks, and I find it to be quite an improvement. Since it's cross platform, working on different operating systems is pretty easy too.
KDevelop is my alternative choice. For all intents and purposes, KDevelop is my favorite IDE, but since it's only on Linux at the moment, Code::Blocks is my best choice for now. (Still, KDevelop is quite powerful, and I'm eagerly awaiting the cross-platform release.)
Eclipse is also a great choice, though I haven't used it nearly as much. I feel it's a little more focused on Java development, but many /.ers swear by it, so it's probably worth a try.
And on a final note, I've been using Vim a lot more often lately, and with the IDE plugins detailed in the Ars Technica article, I may make that my IDE of choice in the near future. (For others, there's Emacs. Both are great, take your pick.)
I find KDevelop to be excellent IDE for C/C++ development. IT has few rough edges, but tons of features makes it simply the best choice. Integrated debugger, valgrind and cachegrind support, integrated documentation viewer, doxygen generator, ctags, version control etc.
Most professional Linux developer I know are using KDevelop. Others are using Vim and Emacs. I have Emacs guy here who - when exposed to some nasty KDevelop's feature - always claims that "Emacs supports it too, I only have to find and install proper extension". He usually fails or forgets to do so.
... but Visual Studio Express is actually quite good. I'm a Linux guy, and I use Komodo Edit (I do mostly "dynamic language" development now) and before that I used Eclipse for C/C++ and Java, and although Eclipse gets a lot of things right, it can't beat Visual Studio's breadth of features and simplified work-flow. Of all the things MS has done over the years, VS is hands down (IMHO) the best. They don't give it away with all the features so as to not kill the 3rd party market, but it's clear nothing out there in Win[32/64] land comes close (especially for C++ and C#).
I do the same in Eclipse when coding in Java at least, modify code, and variable value, while the code is running and testing the result without the need to relaunch...what is your point ?
Bollocks: Ctrl-x b. For us emacs-users, it's second-nature.
The reason why so many people still prefer vim or emacs is that we can do everything efficiently using the keyboard only. Coding, switching files, compiling, debugging, everything. And we can do that on our own computer, or on one on the other side of the world with merely ssh and the command-line editor of choice.
You might think that something as simple as switching between files isn't trivial in vim/emacs, but that only shows that you haven't learned either. You can point and click all you want, but programming isn't done with a mouse.
This sig is intentionally left blank
Tip of the week: Even if you're not writing QT code, the integrated qmake builder works WAY better than the autoconf stuff.. then again, anything works better than autoconf ;-)
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
Say you're working with git (but it may be the same with other VCSs, not sure).
Say you run git-commit -a (with no -m) in a M-x shell. Then git wants to spawn your $EDITOR so that you can edit your commit message (and see what you're committing).
In that case, you'd want either emacsclient, which tells emacs to open up a new window for the to-be-edited file (and when you say you're done, emacsclient terminates).
Or you could save yourself the effort and just use git.el, which integrates git into Emacs.
Pirate Party UK
Emacs can be compiled without problems under Windows, but is then strictly Windows, with \ for paths and \r\n for line endings.
You can also compile Emacs under Cygwin, but then it is strictly POSIX and needs a X server to run, otherwise it runs in -nw mode.
Xemacs, however, can be compiled under Cygwin, but recognises that it is under Windows and runs all graphics natively, obviating the need for an X server. That is why I currently only use XEmacs on my job, it works POSIX with Cygwin, but runs natively under Windows.
I thought people preferring GNU make did so due purely due to availability or having all their experience with that - but if I read you right, you say you actually have deep experience with both and still prefer the GNU variant?
I used BSD make ~10 years ago and only very shortly. So I can't really opine on it.
GNU make is often pain, but with careful planning it's getting the job done. But from my experience I would admit that GNU make has enormous capacity to confuse and freak out people. Lazy evaluation isn't for everybody. I probably should be considered GNU make profi, as I have read through its documentation numerous times already. That further precludes me from commenting on BSD make.
I personally prefer (and use for all my pet projects) GNU cons. It's simple and perl based. (N.B. There is also SCons which is Python based. At times slower than cons, but has more features and more portable.) Cons is pretty much only known to me solution to retain sanity on large projects: built-in dep checker, built-in installation support, proper dependency handling for static libraries, built-in object caching, support for commands having multiple products, etc. But the main goal of cons (and what I love it for most) is to guarantee consistent builds: unlike make(s), cons uses MD5 to check whether the source have changed. (Though can be reconfigured to use timestamps). Takes time to get used to, but is really worth it.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Yes! And when you build a house, you should only use hand tools!! A real car has no electronics either!!! Give me a break. You should use the right tools for the job. If someone wants to use an IDE becuase it has code completion, built in docs, etc. So be it!!
Vim with Exuberant CTags, GNU tools and a little self-education comprises a fully featured IDE.
The reason so many use and keep using Vim as an IDE, even for large projects is that they can roll together the toolchain - including debugger, profiler, code browser - and builders that suit them, in the way that suit them. Much of the time the people that complain that Vim cannot function as a full featured IDE seem unaware of Vim's shell interface (:!<program> <args> && <program2> <args> [..]) or its 'plugin' architecture, let alone tabs, split modes, keyword completion, folding or numerous other features typical of other IDEs.
A single terminal hosting Vim is enough to comfortably develop large projects in almost any popular language, covering coding, compiling, debugging and execution. Having worked a lot with the awfully bloated and manifold XCode, the sprawling and mysterious Visual Studio and a little with the rather nice Code::Blocks it's clear that I have no reason to consider changing IDE, for the time being.
I am really surprised no-one mentioned QtCreator which runs on Windows too. You can use Mingw or the visual c++ compiler with QtCreator. Unfortunately you can debug only using Mingw.
It's not about "not having a choice". Windows programmers aren't stupid, they figured out IDEs are far more productive.
To answer the question: Visual C++ Express is the one. Lightweight IDE, best compiler, most standards compliant, best debugger ... it's a free download so don't waste time looking at anything else.
No sig today...
I've tried a few IDEs and this is what I found for C++ development:
*Visual Studio*
- Best debugging
- Handles stl strings, etc
- Easy to change variable values while debugging
- Not very good with stl iterators
- Nice GUI for debugging
- Best interface
- Code completion, etc is all great
- Have to use project files: a pain
- A bit bloated (though not as slow as Eclipse)
*Code::Blocks*
- Debugging is pretty good
- Sometimes a bit buggy (Sometimes can't change variables and stl templates a bit weird)
- In theory does lots of good stuff
- Interface is nice
- Not quite as clean as VS but getting there.
- Allows plugins... could make it better than VS in future
- A lot less bloated then VS
- Project files are better than VS
- Allows for normal Unix makefiles
- Multi platform
*Eclipse/C++*
- Debugging not implemented in the C++ plugin
- Nice interface
- Really bloated, way too slow for me
*Emacs/make*
- I don't know how to use the debugging extensions and I don't feel like spending months to learn them
- Great when running things over ssh, no other method really works
Overall, I find that the debugging capabilities are by far the most important to me. So I use VS for almost all of my development. In fact, it's the only reason I still use Windows.
Wow, what machine are you using?!
I use a Netbook (Atom 1.6GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM & shitty GC) and runs Netbeans, Eclipse and Visual Studio happily. Sounds like you are blaming the IDE for a shitty machine.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
It's because if any part of the toolchain doesn't work for you, it can easily be exchanged for something else without having to exchange the entire toolchain.
Don't like vi? Use emacs instead. The shell and all the other tools you're using won't care. Don' like the Visual Studio editor? Tough!
That same code completion will also embed spelling mistakes in the API because programmers are to lazy to type out the method names and so wont notice when they contain spelling errors. The background compilation process takes resources and will (in all IDE:s I have tested) increase the IDE:s latency. If you type faster than the IDE can process your input, the syntax checking soon becomes more of an annoyance than an advantage.
That same IDE also has a "Rename" button which will automatically replace every instance of the method name by its correct name, and it will work even if it is used as a variable name in other places in the code. As for the latency, it's a non-issue. There is no latency.
Right, you have to double click on the warning. When I see the warning in the shell, I press alt-tab, C-x b, M-g, enter the line number and I'm right at the line that the compiler complained about. And I can do that much faster than it takes you to reach the mouse, scroll the IDE:s compiler output window and double-click on the warning.
Not only is a double-click much faster (and I type fast), but even if it wasn't, Visual Studio also has a shortcut for direct line fetch (And it's a lot shorter than that C-bufferbly instructions manual you just wrote)
For newbies and people who cannot touch type, yes. For professional programmers, not so much.
It has nothing to do with being a "newbie" or not, that's just emacs elitism shit. There are VS newbies just like there are emacs newbies, and while you don't seem to be an emacs one, it's obvious by your post that you ARE a Visual Studio newbie, and in that case it's no wonder you think it's so slow and clunky when it's in fact faster.
Take a look at http://www.codelite.org/. I occasionally teach C++ and I have the problem that not all students have a C++ dev platform installed. If they have one, I let them use it. If not, I recommend CodeLite. I spent a lot of time looking for an cross platform free IDE that I could recommend to students. I needed something that worked. Something that was pretty simple to get people up on running on. And, because students come from many backgrounds and have different ability to pay I really wanted something that was free. I used to use Dev-C++, but support for that project is over and wxDev-C++ is to closely tied to wxWidgets.
CodeLite works, is reasonable easy to learn, and it is free.
Stonewolf
Hmm... I'd go as far as to say, why the hell is any modern developer having to worry about = or := in makefiles anyway? Christ, there's a reason modern IDEs handle all this for you... its tedioius, error prone, and saps your time from the REAL issue, which is building the application.
To the Ask poster, use VS Express, and ignore the retards complaining about "handholding." I assume you want to program to get something done, not spend time on tasks barely related to programming and which modern tools have solved nicely.
Emacs has good GDB integration (it also integrates with the debuggers of Python and Perl, and can be integrated with any command-line debugger). It's basically what Eclipse CDT does (which also integrates with GDB).
Emacs also has a good LaTex editing mode.
That's the biggest advantage of Emacs over Vim. In Emacs you can integrate external tools without blocking the main thread, making it possible to execute those tools in the background. Emacs is a lot more IDE-like.
Why would you need UML modeling? Surely UML diagrams are good for documenting the code, but not for development.