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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."
nuf sed
What else would you need?
I like it, just wish I could get CUSP (Lisp plugin) working in Ubuntu. If anyone says Emacs or Vi they are insane and have never done 10k lines of code in a modern environment.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Keep in mind that VC++ is not the Microsoft Platform SDK. These are two completely different, albeit related, products. The SDK had a bug in getline(), but VC can't really do anything about the quality of the installed SDK.
The best free IDE is the one that you don't have to think about, it just gives you the tools to do your job without getting in your way.
My in-laws have a Mercedes. On the infrequent opportunities I have to drive it, I am always amazed at how well it supports my driving. It is the little things like rotating the headlights into a turn, actually automatically switching into neutral when the car comes to a stop, and auto-dimming rear view for night driving that make driving it a pleasure.
As long as you don't piss yourself in disgust when Microsoft is mentioned (as many here do) - Visual Studio is actually very good.
NetBeans is not that bloated.. it is comparable to Eclipse and in some cases better than Eclipse when it comes to Java.
I use Visual Studio exclusively when developing in Windows. My only complaint is the lack of multi-monitor support but that's coming in 2010.
I am surprised to see you describe Netbeans as bloated when compared to Eclipse. I fought with Eclipse for years before trying out Netbeans, and have been nothing but pleased with it. More than anything, it is the bloat of Eclipse that drove me away! Plugins upon plugins upon plugins, all heaped together in some massive directory. Configuration panels that need a search box!
My Netbeans experience has been a breath of fresh air.
I've used several different IDEs, with several different languages, for many different programming tasks, over the past decade. I have encountered exactly one instance where having a "project" be anything more than a collection of files I work on at the same time was actually a good thing. Every other time it has simply been an obstacle to bottom-up design, by forcing me to make a lot of decisions about the structure of my code before most of it had actually been written.
The one time the project-oriented IDE was a good thing, I was working on a large app with more than a dozen people who never got to all meet at once, with a central authority dictating the general structure of things to make sure we didn't duplicate effort or step on each others' toes. There was AI involved, so having an integrated debugger to figure out why the AI was making particular choices was very useful. Kdevelop served us very well.
Of course, large development teams are inefficient and prone to communication problems that cause delays and bugs, so they should be avoided whenever possible, just like top-down design. Most of the time, I'm either working on incremental modifications to mature code, where a glorified source browser is sufficient, or writing a small utility from scratch by myself, where I really just need a text editor and a command line. I generally use kscope for the former, and kate for the latter. They get out of the way and let me code.
Sure, I still use a debugger, but the overwhelming majority of the time it's to analyze dumps from crashes I can't reproduce easily, so integrating it with the IDE offers no benefit. A debugger is no substitute for understanding the code, and I can count on one hand the number of times there have been enough control flow-relevant variables being modified at once to make that something I couldn't work out in my head or on a whiteboard.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
If anyone says Emacs or Vi they are insane and have never done 10k lines of code in a modern environment.
While the handling of Vi or Emacs actually *is* breathtakingly bizar and unwieldy, what you're saying is not correct. If someone actually takes the time to learn to use Emacs and the extensions it offers for developement - which can take a few years - it can be the most powerfull and fast IDE out there. And it opens files upwards of 40 MB (that's Megabyte) in half a minute and then you can navigate around them with no delay at all. That league of performance is the reason I started using it. In terms of performance Emacs is the most powerfull IDE on the planet.
Then again, I started using Emacs 3 years ago - after briefly considering the purchase of Macsperts new darling child TextMate, basically a modern Emacs rip - and I still can't bear it for longer than 10 minutes - mostly because it so totally doesn't comply with CUAS (Common User Access Standard). Yet then again, Emacs was created when CUAS didn't even exist, so that's no fault on behalf of Emacs.
Bottom line:
If you are willing to invest months (!) of time actively learning an IDE, the cli version of Emacs will be with you until the day you die, as it runs well on everything that uses electricity. Up from the most powerfull supercomputer using the most bizar unix variant right down to a 10-year old handheld PC.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Eclipse is brilliant for Java development - there is nothing quite like it I have found.
When it comes to C++, things are a bit stickier. The infrastructure is there for good code complete and refactoring tools, but they are currently (last I looked, a few months ago) too slow to be really usable and just a bit erratic. Code completion that sometimes throws up the wrong answers is much more frustrating than no code completion at all, and code completion that regularly takes significantly longer than typing the expression manually is worse again.
As seems to be the rule with all things eclipse: If it almost works in this version, it will work in the next version, and it will be fast the version after that.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
I use Qt Creator, xemacs and vim. On all platforms.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
Seriously. Why bother? IDEs are so hard to simply so hard to setup. Whenever I try to use one, I always end up fighting with trying to add nonstandard libraries, or hooking it into the code repository. It's horrible. Seriously, a three line makefile is all you need. It is so much easier just being able to say, "You! Compile this, with this option." It's 50 thousand clicks and it still doesn't work.
God, IDEs suck.
Why would you do that from a shell buffer instead of using Emacs built in version control operations?
What more does anyone want?
The efficiency that is gained by not having to move your project through 20 different tools manually?
In other words, the INTEGRATED part of "IDE".
Yes, that's what's generally referred to as zealotry and ignorance.
If someone just wants to build Windows apps then Visual Studio is far and away the quickest and easiest way to do that.
A lot of people don't care if their software was built by an angel with a halo over his head, if that software isn't very productive they'd rather take the piece written by an average day to day coder.
Some people have better things to do than bicker about religious software vendor wars and just go for what lets them get the job done best, and sorry, but free software all too often just loses out here, until there's a realiation of that, it aint gonna change but the free software has a strong focus on getting things to work, without much effort ever being put into how it works and improving usability and productivity.
Asking people to give up usability and productivity for some moral stance is going to be about as easy as getting blood out of stone.
I support the idea of free software, but the free software movement has to accept these points and act on them as the ideology alone isn't enough to make people switch.
I think you’re missing the "I" in "IDE".
Vi, gdb/dbx and strace should be all any unix/linux coder needs.
Which means that you don't use vim, make, a sccs, a profiler, ctags, or one of a dozen other tools.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
wx is about the best free GUI toolkit available for Windows. They all suck to some degree, but wx less so than the others.
I'm not sure why the OP is bothered by Dev-C++ not being updated. If it works, why not carry on using it?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Frankly, I would put /bin/bash as first on the list.
My toolchain (ranked by degree of my dependency on the tool) is: bash, vim, exuberant ctags, GNU make, GNU diff, GNU grep, GNU find, GCC, man, git, perl, gdb, objdump.
The chain covers about 95% of projects I do. (To GNU moniker: I'm no GNU nazi, but just to highlight the fact that - flame me all you want - I find the BSD variants of the tools mostly useless in everyday use.)
VIM is powerful indeed. But one should never forget that sizable chunk of its utilities depend on good shell and system file/text tools. Otherwise you probably want to pick Emacs instead.
P.S. For Qt/KDE development one also has to include qmake and FireFox (on-line documentation browser).
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
What's the difference between activating "make" thru some keystrokes in the IDE, and Alt-tabbing to another window and typing "make"?
Count the keystrokes.
Its all of 1 keystroke in (for example) Visual Studio to build a project and start debugging it.
Alt-Tab, make is 5x that amount. And I might do this a hundred or more times in a day.
But that won't actually work do it, you have to save the file. So that's a couple more keystrokes per round trip to count (and a 100+ opportunities to forget to save the file(s) added to your day)
And that's on a tiny project with apparently one editor window and one terminal window. Alt-tabbing 7 or 8 times, and saving changes in half a dozen different editor windows before going to the terminal and typing make is a more realistic scenario, and its a lot more keystrokes...
Plus, the IDE indicated I had a syntax error as I was typing it, and the code completion prevented me from making another one; and when the class I was trying to instantiate didn't get colored as a 'type' by the syntax highlighter that I knew was correct I immediately knew I hadn't included it in this file. All that saved me a round trip or two through the build process.
And when the app compiled there was a compiler warning; in the IDE a double click on the warning took me right to the source line in the editor, so I could fix it, and rebuild. With bash I get to read the name of the file and linenumber that had the problem, alt-tab to the right editor window, manually jump to the line number, make the fix, save it, and then switch back to the terminal window and run the build script again.
So... no difference at all between an IDE and bash, except the IDE saves me multiple round trips through make, prevents errors, and saves thousands of keystrokes a day.
I didn't say the IDE was more "powerful", I just said it was more efficient. And it is.
There are good free IDE's
But the best is Still Visual Studio 2008, specially when you work with .Net
I have used Eclipse to develop Java, but compared to VS2008 it sucks major!
I tried using Visual Studio at work, and was frustrated with the amount of effort it took to create and configure a project
Maybe you're incompetent.
Sounds like you've never found an IDE that suits you. I've tried using the vim + gdb + strace type of development and gotten along just fine, but when you find a decent IDE with a good debugger, stack trace, good search facility, debug probe and a ton of other helpful tools it's hard to go back to messing around with lots of separate ones. I think it's important to be able to use the separate utilities to get a project done, and understand what you're doing with them, but why make life more difficult if you can get something that's integrated and does everything you need in one place?
Try to stop being so suspicious of people who like to work differently to you. It's likely they know how to use the tools you use but prefer an integrated environment to get their work done. Not everyone using an IDE is using it because they want their hands held. Those that do won't be using their IDE properly anyway.
Silly rabbit
For newbies and people who cannot touch type, yes. For professional programmers, not so much.
Spoken by someone, who very obviously, has never taken the time to learn the ins and outs of a good IDE like Eclipse or VS. There's no argument here. If all things are equal, ie you know both methods the same, and IDE is SO much faster to work with that it's not even close.
You'll have that sometimes...
Do you also use a second terminal for typing in the "make" command? What about other terminals for viewing documentation or file structure? Vim is only a small part of the entire interactive development environment that you actually use. I code mostly in Java and use Netbeans. It contains not only the middle bit for actually writing the code, but I also get windows for debugging and viewing the directory structure. Although this could mostly be achieved by a few terminal windows and Vim, I prefer to use Netbeans because I get nice context boxes showing me the structure of a particular method/function with a little documentation on it.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
I think it's worth the time anyway. Look at the original request.....casual programmer. Microsoft has catered to that market for quite a while (one of the reasons that VB was thought of as a "second rate" language at times -- and most enterprise developers I know disparaged "VB coders"). As a casual programmer, who wants to deal with make files and hand coding GUI's in a text editor or any of the stuff mentioned so far? Create a Solution file, Add one or more projects, set up a small local DB if needed, drag and drop the interface, code the events, step through the code in debug, and build the final solution. To me, Visual Studio is the easiest INTEGRATED development environment. Out of the "box", I can do everything I need to build complete apps with no tweaking required. I've used others and always found them missing *something* that I have to track down some plug-in or extra utility to accomplish.
For the original poster, I'd recommend Visual Studio Express. For anyone else that does serious programming......I still think that Visual Studio is a good development environment, but if you want to be a MS basher then get Eclipse (which I personally don't enjoy using, but it is widely supported and can eventually do everything you need after a lot of tweaking).
I don't think it's your development environment that's providing an efficiency problem.
CodeWarrior has a feature no other current Windows-based IDE has - independent free floating edit windows without being locked into an MDI container with grey backdrop. I'd gladly pay a few hundred dollars for a modern, actively supported editor that had such a feature (I hear SlickEdit has been planning it, but they have yet to deliver).
Mod parent up. Why is it that, two decades after GUIs became the norm for spreadsheets and word processors, programmers still have to make do with tabbed editors and split-screens? (This is not to say that tabs and split views aren't important.) Am I the only developer who'd like to use his second monitor for something other than Slashdot?
I'm getting the impression from people I talk to that until very recently, Netbeans really sucked. Since version 6.0 it has sucked significantly less. Not sure if that is enough less suck to be better than eclipse or not - my limited experience with both has indicated that they both are very usable, but have their issues.
Your comparison is incorrect because that is not how shell people write software. In your example, make would be the last command in the bash history.
You are constructing ridiculously optimal cases for your argument.
make might be the last command, it might not be. You'll have to visually check it before you push enter after pushing the up arrow. Maybe its make, maybe it was some other tool, maybe you deleted an object file, or ran grep on some output. Your single alt-tab is also probably really multiple alt-tabs -- most of us professional programmers have more than a single shell and a single text editor window going.
And if you've got multiple text-editors, you might have multiple ctrl-s's to save them. So sure, it might be ctrl-s, alt-tab, up, enter... or it might be ctrl-s, alt-tab, alt-tab, ctrl-s, up, up, up, enter. And because you need to actually confirm that the correct window and bash command are selected, you can't necessarily do it blind foldeded -- you need that visual feedback loop.
Reaching all the way for F5 is faster. And hey, Visual Studio is happy to let you remap keys. You want compile to be ctrl-; go for it. It even comes with a pile of emacs short cut schemes; you just have to turn them on.
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.
Wow, that's digging awfully deep for an nit to pick at.
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
No, I don't have to double click.
By default I can press Alt-F6 a couple times to cycle tool windows to the error list, down-arrow to select the warning, and enter to jump to the line in the code. Less than half the keystrokes you need. (assuming 'enter the line number' is at least a 3 to 4 digit number). And if there are 10 text editors going and the one I want is actually closed, its still just 3 or 4 keystrokes, because the IDE selects the correct editor... and even opens the file if its closed.
And again, I setup additional hotkeys. And I can make hotkeys that are more preciese... instead of 'cycle tool window' I can hotkey - 'select compiler output tool window'. I can macro the whole thing too... and we're not talking 'simple recorded keystroke sequences' we're talking full on context and state aware stuff; branching, conditionals, full on programs unto themselves.
Really, modern IDE's approach emacs in terms of flexibility, extendability, programmability, etc.
For newbies and people who cannot touch type, yes. For professional programmers, not so much.
Spare me.
"Well then why don't you just explain it to us?"
You suggest that vi is usable, and then suggest that just because I can't use it doesn't mean it isn't usable. Truly usable software does not require any amount of training, prior knowledge or particularly high levels of skill, realistically you shouldn't even need documentation. If you truly believe vi can be used by someone who has never used it before without any reference, help or anything like that then you're lost so deeply in your zealotry that you're undoubtedly doing more harm than good to the free software movement because your view of software is so far removed from the view of software which people expect that you are no help whatsoever in getting the word out there for FOSS.
A good way to understand usability is that with usable software it should be clear how to perform a specific task through nothing more than seeing the interface. If your application is entirely keyboard shortcut driven then, it fails badly at usability, unless there is clear information on screen at which point it is somewhat usable, but there is almost certainly a better way of doing it. I am not against keyboard shortcuts, they are great for power users and help productivity when you know what they are, but in something as complex as a high end IDE you cannot keyboard shortcut everything without keyboard shortcuts simply getting out of hand.
In terms of general productivity, the most obvious factor is that VS has the best intellisense implementation out there and it only gets better when you're using the likes of C# with inline XML documentation. But really, from the debugger through to libraries and language features such as LINQ, Microsoft's development suite has so much to offer in terms of productivity. Rather than try and run through every individual productivity feature in VS though wasting my time reiterating what's already out there if you bother to look for yourself, I'll assume you can use Google and move on.
"With the wealth of alternatives available (let's not leave out Eclipse, since it seems pretty popular too, as well as Free), I can see no reason to tolerate the moral bankruptcy of the factors of Visual Studio. But you don't want to talk about _that_."
Again, no one really cares how corrupt Microsoft is when it comes to making money themselves. The moral aspect of using Microsoft software is no big deal for most people when you compare to the moral aspect of other every day vendors from your fuel vendors for your car, to your sweat shop made iPods and clothes, Microsoft is in the grand scheme of things, guilty of far less evils than many other companies whose products we consume every single day. Presumably then, if immoral companies are such a big issue for you you've never fuelled your car, never bought branded clothing or gadgets and have never eaten at a fast food chain? If you cannot honestly answer yes to that, then you're a hypocrit.
"I'll agree that the Imperial "Tools" are da bomb. Not being a beginner, however, "Beginner Friendly" is not what I want."
Not being a beginner at what exactly? Certainly a lack of understanding about software usability suggests you're severely lacking in some of the more important concepts of software development. Perhaps you mean you're just good at churning out code which is only a small part of software development? In the real world, companies need to do more than just churn out code though, they need full product life cycle from requirements gathering, to design, to implementation, to testing, to deployment and of course maintenance. Microsoft offers a full blown tool chain to handle all of that in a single package, that's quite attractive and it's something the FOSS world needs to work seriously hard towards to offer an alternative. Eclipse is certainly the best attempt at this so far, but it's still not quite there.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
An IDE is an Integrated Development Environment. That means all the necessary development steps for at least coding and compiling and debugging are part of the same interface.
That doesn't mean swap out to a different terminal session and type "make."
I've never understood the sad devotion to vi and vim and other obfuscated tools that UNIX elitists have. Sure I can use vi, but why in god's name would anyone want to unless they're forced to work over ssh for all of their development?
If you're comfortable with it, that's one thing. Recommending somebody else cripple themselves with obsolete technology that completely ignores how people actually work because it should be enough for anybody reeks of that famous Bill Gates quote.
I coded both with Vim and IDEs like Eclipse or KDevelop, but I never found the GNU equivalents for graphical UML modelling and class/objects trees. Or easy ways to integrate gdb with vim like so many IDEs integrate their debugger. When working with gdb I always have to search the right line in the backtrace and then jump to the line in the source code manually. That's a typical repetetive task that gets strenous after a while. Or when editing LaTeX: IDEs like Kile have a list for inserting special symbols for math mode; with vim I always start to search my little LaTeX book or the web because I can't (and won't) remember all special symbols that there are.
As much as I enjoy using bash for the things it's best at, you are showing the blind spot that irritates me most about open source evangelism and UNIX purism.
That is the mistaken 100 tools that do the same thing (and more) as one single specialized program are just as good as having a single program custom tailored to your tasks. With that sort of attitude, nobody would ever have written "make" in the first place, let alone all those automated tools to write makefiles.
For that matter, "bash" would never have been written because "sh" can already do most of the same stuff and commandline tools and cleverly written shell scripts can make up the functionality, right?
I think by now, if you're reading this at all, you're scowling and looking for something to disagree with.
The point is that sh and the dozens of powerful commandline GNU tools based on the great old stuff that was written for UNIX are still useful and relevant today, but they're not the only thing that is useful and relevant today. Sometimes you just want a single tool which does the job and gets out of your way with the least amount of effort. That doesn't make you stupid or lazy or childish, or everybody who's using bash right now needs to grow up.
If you have to spend 5 minutes writing a command with 12 pipes and output redirection through 13 programs which duplicate a functionality I get from a single checkbox in, say, Visual Studio, then you're not working efficiently. And merely because I choose to skip those steps does not mean I have no idea how to do them - I'm a professional UNIX system administrator as my day job.
The point is that although practice makes perfect, familiarity breeds contempt. When I get home to code on my own projects, I'd prefer not to have to write makefiles, build scripts, hand compile everything, edit out of a single window so I never forget to save anything, and constantly search for line numbers in a lousy no-syntax-highlighting no-code-completing circa 1980 text editor. I did that circa 1980, and I believe in progress.
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
Then I bought my mac and discovered XCode. It blew my mind. If I ever go back to linux I will be finding myself a good IDE.
How so? I mean, my major IDE experience comes with VS2k5, though VS is generally considered one of the better IDEs out there, and while I've found it useful, about the only things I find truly excellent is it's code completion features, and the ability to easily jump to a symbol definition with F12... but I'd hardly call those a "blew my mind"-type features (and they can certainly be done in Vim or Emacs).
So what else does XCode do that's so impressive?
Asking people to give up usability and productivity for some moral stance is going to be about as easy as getting blood out of stone.
For some, living the moral life is a prerequisite for sleeping at night.
This is a common theme. People tried out version 1 or 2 of Eclipse, bitched that it was slow, and never tried it again. Version 2 was... jeeze... probably about 2001 or 2002? I know when I started working on CDT in 2004, version 3.0 had just come out.
Eclipse has come a long way in the last 5 years, and so have the JVMs. I think you'd find that there is a world of difference now in comparison.
And they are almost certainly hypocrits.
It's nigh on impossible to live the moral live without living in a cave.
No doubt the PC you posted that message on will end up in a nigerian scrap yard polluting the toxic components into the land rivers and sea in that area.
Living a moral life does not mean you get to pick and choose what morals you follow, doing that means you're just choosing a different set of morals that are and aren't important to you than someone else without actually making you any more of a good person.
Unless you sew your own clothes rather than purchase those in shops that have almost certianly come from sweat shops, unless you forego use of a vehicle filled up with fuel from the large fuel giants that pollute and even make species extinct, unless you have never wasted a drop of food in your life whilst children are starving in ethiopia, unless you've never consumed a product whose leftovers end up in a tip seeping pollutants into the earth and riverways used by humans, unless you've never consumed a newspaper or other publication from one of the controlling media groups such as Murdoch's, unless you can claim to have never done any of those things, you cannot possibly suggest that you are a more moral person than anyone else.
So there's the problem, when people are more than happy to support companies that have caused species of plant or animal to go extinct (from big oil, to wood/paper product firms) as a matter of their daily lives, I do not think taking a moral stance against Microsoft, which has actually been far more philanthropic than the likes of Apple and many other tech. companies ever have is really high on anyone's agenda.
Ironically, being more productive and hence less stressed is almost certainly going to net the majority of average joes working their day to day lives a much better night's sleep than pretending they've actually made a difference by not supporting Microsoft whilst guzzling gallons of fuel on their commute to and from work each week.