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."

Comments

Re:Emacs

[umghhh]

give the parent mod points for he is speaking the words of wisdom!

Re:Eclipse and Netbeans

[Anonymous Coward]

Give Code::blocks a try, if that does not suit you try Dev-c++.
Dev-c++ works perfectly for me as a developer

Re:Emacs

[mikeage]

It's a nice OS... but it needs a good text editor

Re:Visual Studio

[mario_grgic]

I'll say this. There is nothing more powerful, faster, and productive than standard UNIX tools (bash with find, grep, sed, awk, perl, tail, sort etc) good editor either VIM (faster actual editing) or emacs.

Of course, learn to touch type, learn and use regular expressions where appropriate.

Yes, it takes couple of years to learn all this stuff (of active learning each day. Touch typing will take 6 months alone. VIM alone will take a year or so to get really proficient). UNIX tools can take a couple of years to get familiar with and proficient with. But once the UNIX way sinks in, it gets easier.

But once you do it's like nirvana, and you just can't believe how much more productive you are. Then you will look back at your current world view and smile quietly "oh, boy how naive I was". (if you don't do that regularly you are not growing as fast as you should by the way).

And the nice thing, this power of UNIX is available everywhere (Linux, OS X, Windows (either cygwin or MKS Toolkit), and any traditional UNIX like Solaris, HPUX, AIX etc).