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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
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.
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).
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.
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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.
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.