Best C++ IDE for *nix [closed]

Answer 1

The problem with most IDEs is that they want to have a certain degree of control on how the project is organized, and this could be a problem if you have to work on that project with other people. In my experience this leads to two series of related problems:

• If you start a project in a particular IDE, they will layout for you a particular directory structure, file organization, file naming convention, build system, etc. Of course most of these options are customizable, but it's not always possible to adhere to specific conventions which you might be required to follow. Projects with a complex build system might be difficult to implement from within the IDE. Moreover, the project might not be suitable for external, independent modification; so for instance, if you are planning to write an opensource application, avoid making the IDE a dependency for the project.

• If you import a project started elsewhere, chances are it won't be very easy to use all the features provided by the IDE. You will have to figure out how to hook the build system, the debugger (as the binaries might not be where expected), etc. This is especially true for large and complex projects.

The reason why these ares not a problem under Windows is that Visual Studio is a de-facto standard. Under *nix there's a tendency not to impose particular tools/editors when developing a project collaboratively, and this is why these "cross-IDE communication" problems arise.

As a final note, if you learn, say, kdevelop or netbeans, you might have problems if one day you have to work on a machine where installing those is problematic (e.g. you might not have a Java runtime available and you might not be allowed to install it). If you learn (say) Vim + plugins, you are way safer: you can keep your configuration as a .zip file on your webserver and be pretty sure that Vim will always be available everywhere.

Answer 2

I can't really vouch for the Eclipse module, but that might be attributed to the fact that I'm on Windows and have nearly no idea what I'm doing.

Can't go wrong with your favorite text editor though.

Answer 3

As a programmer who has been writing code under linux for many years, I simply cannot seem to move away from using Vim for writing code.

Once you learn it, and learn some of its more advanced features (Code Folding, how to use ctags, how to work with multiple buffers effectively, etc) moving to another editor is very hard - as everything else seems to be missing features that you're used to.

The only other editor with a superset of vim's features is emacs. I highly recommend learning one or the other - and if you have questions, don't hesitate to ask here or in #emacs or #vim on irc.freenode.net - there's a very large and helpful community that will help you learn what extensions or commands best suit the software editing problems that you're facing.

[Edit: A comment noted that "vim isn't an IDE", I agree. I don't like the IDE moniker because it means a gui with a project manager and a bunch of drop down boxes. I like to use the terminology "Good Tools". See Ted Leung's writings on the matter]

Answer 4

If you're coming from Windows & Visual Studio, you might find Code::Blocks meets your expectations.

That was my experience; I tried a few others first, but they all seemed to expect me to do a lengthy tutorial before I could start doing anything interesting - and with a dozen IDEs to try, that could take days.

With Code::Blocks there were no hoops to jump through, and very little mandatory cruft to learn before I could be productive. I still prefer Visual Studio, but Code::Blocks can open my Visual Studio projects, and it doesn't seem to want me to waste any time, so it's the winningmost *nix IDE for me.

Answer 5

I was a VisualStudio + VA-X user before I switched to ubuntu, and needed good auto completion and function navigation features in any IDE.

I have tried Netbeans,Eclipse CDT,CodeBlocks,Geany,Anjuta, KDevelop and finally settled for KDevelop since that was the closest I could get to VS+VA-X.

Eclipse & NetBeans are too heavy & sluggish for my taste. Most of the other IDEs have buggy/incomplete/dumb auto completion & other features; or they want to take control of your code and needs to be imported into projects; or they put 101 files in your source folder. Only KDevelop allowed me to have a simple link to my src folder and let me work. auto completion is not brilliant, but better than the others.

KDevelop doesn't blend well with my Gnome, but I can live with it ;)

Answer 6

Eclipse isn't bad, but you have to do things Eclipse's way. Eclipse has some built in ideas on directory layout. For a new project, Eclipse is a reasonable choice. Importing an existing project into Eclipse may require some restructuring.

I used to use Eclipse under QNX for C++. The QNX people actually developed the C++ capability, so QNX would have an IDE.