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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."
Oh. Uh, some of us here are working with a higher value of "free" than "free as in beer". The monopolist will never meet this standard, and we therefore shun it and all its products.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
On Windows you don't really get much choice about using an IDE but I'm suspicious of unix coders who use them. If they need to be hand held to that extent while developing perhaps their skills arn't quite up to the job. Vi, gdb/dbx and strace should be all any unix/linux coder needs.
No I'm not trolling, those are just my old fashioned get-orf-my-lawn views. YMMV.
For "Beginner Friendly", I'll agree that the Imperial "Tools" are da bomb. Not being a beginner, however, "Beginner Friendly" is not what I want.
Heh. "Tools."
Every time you deliberately misspell a word with a dollar sign it means your IQ score is 1 point lower. I don't mean it subjectively; I mean, literally, it is an empirical indication of your intelligence approaching the point at which your central nervous system is no longer able to sustain respiration without mechanical intervention.
I know you might find this concept difficult to imagine but it is, in fact, possible to engage your peers in discourse about a Microsoft without making thousands of brazen observations of the fact that Microsoft asks for money in exchange for goods and/or services. I'm sure you sat there in your office chair, drumming your fingers together or stroking your neckbeard, positive that you were being exceptionally witty and creative by replacing the letter 'S' with a similar-looking dollar sign, but you weren't, it's infantile and it hasn't been funny, witty or poignant in about 8 years.
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.
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.
You, sir or madam, are correct.
I'd also like to add that a usable interface should build upon the skills that the user already has acquired and should behave in a fashion consistent with other tools in the same environment.
In other words, if you have a windows code environment, it should behave like Windows applications viz similar hotkeys, window behavior, etc.
To that extent, the value of software like vim or emacs holds up, as the user expects them to be as arcane and hard to learn because everything else on the commandline is. Holding them up as examples about how free software is not only equal in quality but also morally imperative, as the original troll claimed, is totally absurd however from a usability standpoint.
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
MSVC++ code runs pretty damn slow on my UltraSPARC running OpenBSD.
Yeah, but you do all your development on an x86 machine. Ass.