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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."
What else would you need?
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.
If you're writing 10,000 lines in a single file regularly, then your probably need to re-evaluate your coding methods (and you're probably not writing "good stuff"). An IDE does more than just allowing you to fill a file with many lines of text, it keeps your 10,000 lines over multiple files organised... and you know... a huge number of other helpful things (code-completion/etc).
I don't think the parent's point about handling 10k lines of code has to do with with ability to load these files into memory but rather about managing the complexity of such projects. When a program becomes this big, it becomes harder to keep track of all the names of variables, the argument types of subroutines etc. IDEs like Netbeans or Eclipse have autocompletion functionality that make your life as a developer at lot easier.
It's possible of course that Emacs or vi provide similar functionality but the main point is that you need some type of IDE when managing a large, complex development project.
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
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".
I don't know about emacs, but in vim I can open multiple windows at a time (not to mention multiple buffers!), and switch between them rather effortlessly.
Look, most of use defending vim and emacs are not saying that it is impossible to use an IDE to be productive; just that it isn't necessary. I certainly believe that each person should work with whatever tools they feel comfortable.
However, the "IDE kids" keep categorically rejecting the notion that you can be productive in anything but a large, bulky (and yes, maybe even bloated) integrated system. They would do good not to be so narrow-minded.
I've used both and, although I see value in some IDEs, I personally prefer using the leaner, smaller tools. Sometimes all those windows and automatic wizards and code injectors just get my way.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
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...
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.