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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
I use nano, textwrangler, and jEdit depending on where I am...what's this "IDE" you speak of?!
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.
What else would you need?
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.
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.
version 7.0 RC5 came out 2 months ago.
Wiki page with link
As long as you don't piss yourself in disgust when Microsoft is mentioned (as many here do) - Visual Studio is actually very good.
I'm sure lots of people are happy with emacs.
I'm sure lots of people are happy with American cars too, but we have objective standards for a reason.
For Java & PHP development, Eclipse. Does everything I need it to. For Windows C++ development, VS2008. Work in a MS shop, so not much choice here. Mac Objective-C development, Xcode. Not much choice with this due to nib's being so intergrated with the code.
Free edition of Delphi.
Two options that have not come up yet. KDevelop 4 is shaping up really good, but I do not think it is actually working on win32/64 yet. The other is Qt Software's offer Qt creator which is also getting a good deal of praise. The latter is probably extra good if you use Qt... and if you don't, I would recommend at least looking at it, since it is a very nice LGPL library.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
You hit it in the summary. I program professionally. At work, I use gcc, xcode or msvs (depending naturally on the platform).
At home, for personal development on Windows in C++, nothing beats Visual Studio Express. It's lightweight, meaning they've trimmed out most of the stuff that you don't care about anyways for personal projects.
As much as it might pain the free software crowd, Microsoft has done a good job with Visual Studio Express.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
I swear by Eclipse - I mostly do Java these days though, but I do have it setup for C++, Perl and PHP as well. :-)
Good plug-in support - easy to install and update.. what's not to like?
Integrates with most versioning tools through plug-ins (CVS, SVN etc).
Runs on all platforms. It's great.
I use Apple's Xcode with the Ada plug-in from www.macada.org
I use Eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/ for all my IDE needs. I have found that it works well on any platform (and with any language) that I find myself sitting behind (or coding in). Eclipse gets my vote mainly for its very wide language AND platform support.
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Notepad++ isn't really an IDE but it's probably the best c++ editor I've found for Windows. If you want a full blown IDE then Eclipse is probably your best bet. It's written in Java but with a little fiddling it's not too ugly. As for Dev-C++ it's probably lost support because it's written in Delphi of all things.
Years ago I worked mainly in MS Windows, and I used Dev-C++ as the free IDE, because it's fast and simple.
Then I switched to Linux. Tried KDevelop for a few days but didn't like it. Then discovered Kate, which can work as a sort of IDE, because you can open multiple documents, and open a console window at the bottom to type compile and run commands.
Then KDE4 was release and Kate suddenly was unusable for programming (due to ruined search function). And that's when I discovered Geany, which is really nice, it has the same functionality as Kate but is more clearly geared towards programmers.
Geany works great in Linux, I see that it's cross platform, so I guess you can also get it to work in Windows. But note that due to Windows not having the same compiler tools as Linux available by default, it might be handier in Windows to have something that comes with its own compiler like Dev-C++ :)
Express edition. Free of charge.
The error with getline is a bug with the library/compiler etc. This is separate from the IDE. It's not very difficult to modify the compiler/C runtime etc VC uses - its just an editor which calls out to other executables to do compilation.
In any case - I'm sure that problem has been fixed with Visual Studio express - Microsoft actually do IDEs and compilers very well, especially with their last few iterations. 6 is pretty old.
Personally I use vim on unix. But when doing GUI work on windows, Visual Studio is hard to beat.
I.O.U One Sig.
Thank you
Say you're working with git (but it may be the same with other VCSs, not sure).
Say you run git-commit -a (with no -m) in a M-x shell. Then git wants to spawn your $EDITOR so that you can edit your commit message (and see what you're committing).
In that case, you'd want either emacsclient, which tells emacs to open up a new window for the to-be-edited file (and when you say you're done, emacsclient terminates).
Or, you know that the thing that call $EDITOR from M-x shell require very light-weight editing, so you want a small editor which doesn't use curses.
Yes, I'm seriously suggesting to learn how to use ed. If you know sed and/or vi, it's as simple as spending five minutes with the man page, plus having the man page open for reference the first few times.
It's also a powerful tool for programmatic text manipulation, sitting in a niche where sed is not powerful enough and perl/sh/... is too general to do what you want easily. [it's kinda' like sed but with the whole file in the pattern space and with a few more powerful transformations.]
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.
and I keep them here:
http://www.marthastewart.com/goodthings/magnetized-pin-box
It looks cute, girls get interested in the field.
The lunatic is in my head
Try SharpDevelop if you ever decide to trade in C++ for C# and the .NET framework.
http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SharpDevelop
I'm not really a Microsoft platform coder any more, but I've used this one in the past and it's not bad. Basically a free (as in speech - LGPL) clone of VisualStudio.
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
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 $0.02.
Review their web site. Microsoft Visual Studio Express is free.
Well, you would probably get more than just IDE with that, as TheIDE is quite tightly coupled with the U++ library (http://www.ultimatepp.org/L$www$uppweb$idess$en-us.html_3.png, http://www.ultimatepp.org/L$www$uppweb$idess$en-us.html_4.png), anyway, ide-wise:
- it has cool highlighting, including highlighting of C++ blocks and coloring parenthesis (see http://www.ultimatepp.org/L$www$uppweb$idess$en-us.html_2.png)
- its C++ code-parsing abilitites (for purposes of code-navigation and 'intelisense') are at the moment said to be better than CDT's or at par with Visual Studio, although the problem is that it parses only the project files (not 'external' headers) http://www.ultimatepp.org/L$www$uppweb$idess$en-us.html_5.png.
- if you are rebuilding large projects often, it has very fast build process. It uses two tricks, one widely known (using multiple CPU cores to launch compiler instances), one special (combining files to avoid header reparsing). In practice, on quadcore CPU, it can build up to 16 times faster than plain make.
- works in Win32 and X11.
But there is also a drawback for many users:
- as it adds a strong crossplatform modularity layer, it gets a lot of suffering getting used to it. Simply do not expect your usual Visual Studio copy...
Why is it nobody seems to know about the excellent CodeLite? Described as "a powerful open-source, cross platform IDE for the C/C++ programming languages (build and tested on Windows XP SP3, (K)Ubuntu 8.04, and Mac OSX 10.5.2)" see http://www.codelite.org/
Not free, and also no longer sold for Windows, but it's my favorite IDE of all time. I still use CW9 on Windows for anything that doesn't require absolute latest C++ compiler/libs (mainly, my MUD, which I do my dev on Windows, but run it on a Linux server).
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).
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
I'm essentially a beginner in C++ programming and at least for that language I found extremely easy and straightforward doing projects on Qt Software's free IDE. Even if you don't implement their toolkit in your projects, you can still have a stable and unbloated environment to do some serious coding.
There is only one caveat, afaik, with Qt Creator. It's still in version 1.1.1... this means it probably misses some features (or has some not so obvious bugs) which shall probably be covered in later major releases. Nevertheless, if you bind Qt's capabilitities (ie, signals and slots) to your C++ projects there is no better IDE to unleash your productivity!
You can have more information and download your free copy here.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
Vi is one editor every professional should know the basics of because it's very feature complete and versatile. Emacs is more specialized but I'm not knocking it. However if you're developing today, you need to move away from modal editors that have awful help systems and no menus. They simply don't encourage learning and get in your way if you're away from the editor for too long and have to try to remember obscure commands (or look them up!). Note they are EDITORS. An IDE does much much more. You should also be using IDEs and editors that support multiple languages. Gone are the days when a computer professional could afford to know just one or two languages. Who the hell wants to learn the quirks of different editors for each one?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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.
Personally I am happiest when not stuck in some program pretending to do everything, even if it would succeed admirably.
So for me, it's screen with at least one nvi session and one shell for compiling -- but usually many more, and lots of open manpages for reference. Doesn't even matter much what shell, as long as it supports arrow-up-history and tab-completion. Of course nowadays I have to have a web browser around, sadly very little way around that, so it's X and that and lots of XTerms... many of which sport screen again for various purposes, like irc.
The point? The magic isn't in the software, though it can help a bit. If you're used to the command line then at some point you might realise that speeding up your workflow is as simple as #!/bin/sh. Or any other language you might choose for the task; awk, sed, C, C++, perl, what-have-you.
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
Geany http://www.geany.org/ is small, fast, and has the basic features I need. It has syntax highlighting for everything from Assembly to Latex, Java, C, C++, HTML, you name it. And (very important) it stays the hell out of my face and just lets me do the job. I love it.
I use Qt Creator, xemacs and vim. On all platforms.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
I used DevC++ for quite some time until I found out that it was out of date as well. Since then I've used Code::Blocks, and I find it to be quite an improvement. Since it's cross platform, working on different operating systems is pretty easy too.
KDevelop is my alternative choice. For all intents and purposes, KDevelop is my favorite IDE, but since it's only on Linux at the moment, Code::Blocks is my best choice for now. (Still, KDevelop is quite powerful, and I'm eagerly awaiting the cross-platform release.)
Eclipse is also a great choice, though I haven't used it nearly as much. I feel it's a little more focused on Java development, but many /.ers swear by it, so it's probably worth a try.
And on a final note, I've been using Vim a lot more often lately, and with the IDE plugins detailed in the Ars Technica article, I may make that my IDE of choice in the near future. (For others, there's Emacs. Both are great, take your pick.)
I find KDevelop to be excellent IDE for C/C++ development. IT has few rough edges, but tons of features makes it simply the best choice. Integrated debugger, valgrind and cachegrind support, integrated documentation viewer, doxygen generator, ctags, version control etc.
Most professional Linux developer I know are using KDevelop. Others are using Vim and Emacs. I have Emacs guy here who - when exposed to some nasty KDevelop's feature - always claims that "Emacs supports it too, I only have to find and install proper extension". He usually fails or forgets to do so.
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.
... but Visual Studio Express is actually quite good. I'm a Linux guy, and I use Komodo Edit (I do mostly "dynamic language" development now) and before that I used Eclipse for C/C++ and Java, and although Eclipse gets a lot of things right, it can't beat Visual Studio's breadth of features and simplified work-flow. Of all the things MS has done over the years, VS is hands down (IMHO) the best. They don't give it away with all the features so as to not kill the 3rd party market, but it's clear nothing out there in Win[32/64] land comes close (especially for C++ and C#).
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.
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
and nmake. Who needs fancy syntax coloring. Step debuggers are for weenies who can't manage to use printf()
-=[ place
Tip of the week: Even if you're not writing QT code, the integrated qmake builder works WAY better than the autoconf stuff.. then again, anything works better than autoconf ;-)
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
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.
# cat > program.c
# !cc
What else do you need?
So many comments about VI, Emacs, Ubuntu etc. Did anyone notice the original post said he works on WINDOWS ?
Emacs can be compiled without problems under Windows, but is then strictly Windows, with \ for paths and \r\n for line endings.
You can also compile Emacs under Cygwin, but then it is strictly POSIX and needs a X server to run, otherwise it runs in -nw mode.
Xemacs, however, can be compiled under Cygwin, but recognises that it is under Windows and runs all graphics natively, obviating the need for an X server. That is why I currently only use XEmacs on my job, it works POSIX with Cygwin, but runs natively under Windows.
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.
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
I like and use muck of your toolchain. However, I like Emacs for helping keep my code layout legible, its support of displaying closing parentheses, and its support for running shell commands in one window and viewing the code in the other. I also find the Emacs shell helpful for recording all the input and output of a test sequence, rather than having it scroll entirely off the normal text display, and occasionally I find handy that it displays passwords as I type them so I can remember what the heck I did at the login ptompts of a test setup.
gcc is my friend. It actually works, follows standards, and can support writing portable code in ways that most commercial compilers have never even thought about trying.
autoconf is handy, but has proven problematic for compatibility reasons as different OS's update different components of that toolchain at different times.
And, oh dear, yes, git. I've worked extensively with many open source and some closed source source control systems, and the darned thing Just Works(tm). Being able to branch and record and merge changes from your branches, locally, and then merge them to the primary upstream repository gracefully, and actually caring more than a fig about security, is what Subversion _should_ have done. I'm delighted to have recently added it to my toolkit.
Lazarus is excellent for everyone familiar with Pascal or Delphi... Plus it can compile windows CE apps...
I was a vim guy for a long time. I used it for everything from scripting, to full on applications, and even website development.
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.
Speaking of which XCode + Interface Builder + applescript makes some of the most powerful graphical applications that any idiot could write. It's really quite amazing how easy stupid it can be. Of course real apps on a mac require ruby, python, or Obj-C.
I really like Notepad++ I really wish there was a Linux port for it. But it does run ok in Wine though.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Yes! And when you build a house, you should only use hand tools!! A real car has no electronics either!!! Give me a break. You should use the right tools for the job. If someone wants to use an IDE becuase it has code completion, built in docs, etc. So be it!!
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.
This is plain discrimination.
Few people can - and want - to go into details of how tool-chain really works. I too prefer to view some things as black box with few buttons. By virtue of being system developer, I often have too look into the details of how tool chain really works. And I like to dissect it til understand it completely. But I am rather an exception than a norm.
I know many good developer who know about e.g. make only how to invoke it - "make all". Not more. Rest they do in e.g. Emacs. For Windows (or GUI development in general) it is very hard (if possible at all) to keep a track of all the details tool-chain does for you. And many people prefer to ignore the details - to concentrate on job at hand instead.
[ After all, the concentration is a limited resource: more things people have to keep in their heads constantly, less concentration they can direct to any one of them. ]
The holywar "Emacs v. vi" from its inception revolved around precisely the nature of developer. Some developers like to know the details. Some developers prefer to ignore them and just press a button to achieve desired result. On side of "vi", one has to deal with more information. On side of "Emacs" one has to accept that some workflows would be impossible, since there might be no ready button for it. Side of "vi" is flexibility. Side of "Emacs" is conservatism. Different people - different views of a system - different approach to development. And for a good team one needs a healthy mix of both, because looking at system from two different view points allows the team to cover wider range of solutions.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Delphi and Lazarus/FPC.
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.
I am really surprised no-one mentioned QtCreator which runs on Windows too. You can use Mingw or the visual c++ compiler with QtCreator. Unfortunately you can debug only using Mingw.
You guys are such weenies.
Did you read the author's question? He's doing this for his own personal interest. He doesn't want to have to kill and dress a buffalo with his bear hands just to eat a hotdog.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's not about "not having a choice". Windows programmers aren't stupid, they figured out IDEs are far more productive.
To answer the question: Visual C++ Express is the one. Lightweight IDE, best compiler, most standards compliant, best debugger ... it's a free download so don't waste time looking at anything else.
No sig today...
I've tried a few IDEs and this is what I found for C++ development:
*Visual Studio*
- Best debugging
- Handles stl strings, etc
- Easy to change variable values while debugging
- Not very good with stl iterators
- Nice GUI for debugging
- Best interface
- Code completion, etc is all great
- Have to use project files: a pain
- A bit bloated (though not as slow as Eclipse)
*Code::Blocks*
- Debugging is pretty good
- Sometimes a bit buggy (Sometimes can't change variables and stl templates a bit weird)
- In theory does lots of good stuff
- Interface is nice
- Not quite as clean as VS but getting there.
- Allows plugins... could make it better than VS in future
- A lot less bloated then VS
- Project files are better than VS
- Allows for normal Unix makefiles
- Multi platform
*Eclipse/C++*
- Debugging not implemented in the C++ plugin
- Nice interface
- Really bloated, way too slow for me
*Emacs/make*
- I don't know how to use the debugging extensions and I don't feel like spending months to learn them
- Great when running things over ssh, no other method really works
Overall, I find that the debugging capabilities are by far the most important to me. So I use VS for almost all of my development. In fact, it's the only reason I still use Windows.
>>I went to update my favorite free IDE, Dev C++, yesterday and noticed that it had not been updated since 2005!
Is this necessarily a bad thing?
For every "it doesn't have snazzy new feature x" there's a "it hasn't broken/lost feature y". And you're comfortable and familiar with it. Stability has its advantages. Plus you *can* update the underlying programs if you really need to; they just haven't been rolled into an updated single package.
I'm an embedded systems programmer; we use IAR's ARM IDE at work (definitely NOT free). I used Eclipse briefly on a contract project, and I use DevC++ for my own little home stuff since using it for a course a few years ago. There's a balance point between staying on the bleeding edge, and working with existing fielded non-changing hardware that needs very stable updates from a stable development environment.
"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.
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?
Neigh everyone mentioned either vi or emacs (I know they can run on Windows, but they are not acceptable as an IDE and all ya'll need to get with the times), a few said Eclipse (wtf Java?? yeah it has plugins, but it isn't a C++ IDE dammit!), and DevC++ is just dead.
I recently tried out the Qt Creator and I love it. It feels new and snappy, works well, and emulates Visual Studio's dialog creator (in my opinion, being Qt and not MFC, kicks Visual Studio's bug-laden ass). I haven't been able to really squeeze the useful juices out of Qt yet, but the potential is evident.
Visual Studio Express is great, and if you want to do MFC than thats definitely the way to go, but if you're just programming as a hobby or for personal projects then I suggest giving Qt Creator a try
Well at least having bear hands will make it easier to kill the buffalo. Where do I get a set of those?
Sturgeon was an optimist.
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.
Having had XCode also blow my mind, but in a bad way, I'm really curious what these features are too.
MS VS2k5/2k8 really is pretty good. Now, as I've stated elsewhere in these comments, I'm more of a Vim/Eclipse guy - but I still like any editor that does the following:
1) Improves my workflow .NET code)
2) Improves my speed
3) Reduces my bug count (bugs due to human input error... like an unmatched ' or a missing ; or something)
4) Simplifies hunting for methods/subs (I LOVE auto-complete when doing java or
5) If it involves a compiler, supports stack trace, debug, and walking through the compiler output (in, say, assembler)
I would argue these are the hallmarks of an IDE, actually. Otherwise, we wouldn't need them.
Apparently for you guys, XCode totally nailed these. For me, I spent hours trying to get even basic Carbon/C++/C type stuff to compile. Trying to design interfaces with interface builder made me long for even the Visual Basic 4 interface.
I'm glad it worked... and I'd love to hear what these features are, so that I can re-evaluate them and learn something.
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Well at least having bear hands will make it easier to kill the buffalo. Where do I get a set of those?
Uhm, I'm pretty sure it's part of emacs, but I forget the keystroke.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
He should have Googled = and :=.
Take a look at http://www.codelite.org/. I occasionally teach C++ and I have the problem that not all students have a C++ dev platform installed. If they have one, I let them use it. If not, I recommend CodeLite. I spent a lot of time looking for an cross platform free IDE that I could recommend to students. I needed something that worked. Something that was pretty simple to get people up on running on. And, because students come from many backgrounds and have different ability to pay I really wanted something that was free. I used to use Dev-C++, but support for that project is over and wxDev-C++ is to closely tied to wxWidgets.
CodeLite works, is reasonable easy to learn, and it is free.
Stonewolf
That would be a mistake. I learned on the command line, and in many ways, it's still the way I'm most comfortable with and use more often, but if someone comes and asks me whether I "prefer" farting about at a command line over a decent modern IDE with RAD GUI tools, built in debugger, built in version control, click-to-edit error log handling, build configuration support etc., I'm liable to think they're living in the stone age.
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.
I see you haven't used NetBeans. XCode isn't bad, it's far better then the MS IDEs. I think my fave is Eclipse, not because it's a great editor, but because the plugin ecosystem is very good. I give XCode props because the code completion and refactoring are some of the best I've come across. However, most "hard" programmers still fall back to the terminal for building / testing.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Hmm... I'd go as far as to say, why the hell is any modern developer having to worry about = or := in makefiles anyway? Christ, there's a reason modern IDEs handle all this for you... its tedioius, error prone, and saps your time from the REAL issue, which is building the application.
To the Ask poster, use VS Express, and ignore the retards complaining about "handholding." I assume you want to program to get something done, not spend time on tasks barely related to programming and which modern tools have solved nicely.
Emacs has good GDB integration (it also integrates with the debuggers of Python and Perl, and can be integrated with any command-line debugger). It's basically what Eclipse CDT does (which also integrates with GDB).
Emacs also has a good LaTex editing mode.
That's the biggest advantage of Emacs over Vim. In Emacs you can integrate external tools without blocking the main thread, making it possible to execute those tools in the background. Emacs is a lot more IDE-like.
Why would you need UML modeling? Surely UML diagrams are good for documenting the code, but not for development.