Lightweight IDE for Linux [closed]

Answer 1

Console editors, such as emacs and vi, are more lightweight than their GUI counterparts, and (at least those two are) just as capable as any other IDE (syntax highlighting, mouse support, ctags, autocompletion ... all the way to gdb integration). The learning curve might be somewhat steep, and you might have to do some customization, but its all worth it. Also, vi is present on every installation of unix-like operating system.

Amongst X applications, there are

• gedit which comes with GNOME and has many of these IDE features (see, for example, this blog entry),

• Geany - really fast, depends only on GTK, and with even more features including code folding.

These would be lightweight IDEs, as opposed to heavyweights like Anjuta, KDevelop, Eclipse or NetBeans.

Answer 2

This is a really religious question - just choose the one you like. Every editor has it's pros/cons and you need to decide which set suits best to you. There are many IDEs out there that can use various editors like Pida.

Answer 3

any of the popular editors can be turned into an ide.

I use Vi on the console and have used various gui editors over the years. This doesn't just go for linux I use Crimson Editor on windows as a C/python/z80asm ide.

Answer 4

what about eclipse with linuxtools?

Answer 5

How has no one mentioned Code::Blocks!

Not only is it a fantastic Open Source IDE for C++, but it's fully cross platform, so if you need to work on a Windows or Mac box for a bit, you can use the exact same IDE, and exact same project files to do so! Which is great for cross-compiling!

Answer 6

Nobody mentioned Kate. It's easier than vi for start (and has nice vi-mode for those, who want to migrate to vi), has more options than gedit (And better syntax highlighting). It also has kioslaves support (nice for remote server PHP development) and it's only a little bit more CPU-demanding than gedit. It can also have built-in console (extremely helpful if you want to quick grep through files or compile the project).

There are also features like:

• basic code completion
• advanced indentation and block selection operations
• good and very clean (to read) find/replace with regexp
• comment-out on ctrl+d (it comments out one line or one function if used on function header)

and a lot more...