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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 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.
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.
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 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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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++ :)
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).
If you're writing 10,000 lines in a single file regularly, then your probably need to re-evaluate your coding methods
Word wrap is deceiving. I only wrote 5 lines of code. They are just very long lines.
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.
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.
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.
A magnetized needle and a steady hand? Nah - Real programmers use ....
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/real_programmers.png
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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).
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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.
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If anyone says Emacs or Vi they are insane and have never done 10k lines of code in a modern environment.
Hoping that I'm not about to start a flame war: why?
I assume you're qualified to make that statement, which means you know both emacs and vi very well. Whenever you think there's something $EDITOR can't do, you have (1) searched the web for that functionality; (2) asked in the relevant IRC channel(s); and (3) asked on mailing lists, news groups, forums and the like.
Let's see; they have (I'm most certain that I'm speaking about emacs, less certain about vi)
Uhmm... what more do you want? Especially for small 10k-line projects. Example: wminput, which translates wiimote events to uinput events, is 9236 lines (in wminput/**/*.[ch]; this doesn't include bluetooth or wiimote libraries).
I think that if you think 10k lines even begins to stretch the capabilities of emacs (or vi), you don't know either editor very well. And you can probably find people who'd point at me and laugh (and suggest I don't know the editors very well) when I suggest that 10m begins to stretch their capabilities ;-)
And I think they'd have a good case: at 10m lines, it's not a question of good editors but of good architectures. Good architectures will allow each developer to work on somewhere between 10 to 100 klocs at a time, not worrying about anything outside their slice of code (until they move on to their next project). [But this is wild conjecture, so take it with a bucketload of salt...]
* pronounced "a(rrrrrhhhhh)ida", like how Stallman pronounces the chi in "LaTeX" and "TeXinfo" or ch in "Bach". I'm not sure about spelling. Search Google tech talks for Bram Molenaar if you really want to know (and hey, it's a nice talk in its own right).
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.
Bollocks: Ctrl-x b. For us emacs-users, it's second-nature.
The reason why so many people still prefer vim or emacs is that we can do everything efficiently using the keyboard only. Coding, switching files, compiling, debugging, everything. And we can do that on our own computer, or on one on the other side of the world with merely ssh and the command-line editor of choice.
You might think that something as simple as switching between files isn't trivial in vim/emacs, but that only shows that you haven't learned either. You can point and click all you want, but programming isn't done with a mouse.
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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
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.
# cat > program.c
# !cc
What else do you need?
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.
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
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...
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.
Because I lost two of the fingers on my third hand in a freak threshing accident, you insensitive clod.
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.
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.
Wow! what a smart comment. I'm impressed. Did you write that yourself, or was there a wizard for it?
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
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.
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.
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.
Lightweight IDE - it may only be a 3MB installer, but it downloads a lot more to install on the fly and it can chew up plenty of resources for any non-trivial code bases. It often stalls out updating Intellisense on a project of any appreciable size. Part of the reason it's a smaller install is all the help and docs are online which makes doing work without an active internet connection a PIA (i.e. laptop on an airplane).
best compiler - Nope. Not even close. Intel compiler is generally 10-20% faster code than MSVC++.
most standards compliant - I don't even know how to answer this other than to say I'm hoping you are joking. MSVC++ doesn't even handle empty-struct inheritance according to the C++ standards. Oh, and how about variables defined in a for-statement leaking out of their scope? For an idea of just how non-standards compliant MSVC++ is, take a look at the Boost source code and then check out how much of the code is actually work-arounds for bugs / non-standard features in MSVC++. Both GCC and Intel compilers come much closer to the C++ standard than MSVC++.
best debugger - You got me there. Visual Studio (Express) does have a pretty well polished and easy-to-use debugger. I guess I can give you one out of four.