IDE comparisons

[TheSilencerPL]

Which IDE (Integrated Development Environment) do you prefer?

Here are some descriptions of some I've had experience with.

 

Number 1 of all for me: SlickEdit

It's the commercial one, but it offers really flexible and comfortable environment. I like it the most mainly because of its editing features, but debugging perspective is also one of my favorites. It's advertised by the authors as the tool created by the programmers for the programmers. And this is true, at least for me. It handles fluently different languages, like java, C, C++. It's really convenient to use it. For example, the feature I like the most is the possibility to work without even touching the mouse. Shortcuts are really easy to remember, and auto hovering windows are top notch. Finding tag occurrences with the preview of its usage in the found place is fantastic. Haven't found better so far. It supports windows and linux. There is also slickedit eclipse plugin available, but I haven't used it. Autocompletion is great. There are some problems sometimes, when it doesn't follow your changes fast enough, but this happens really rarely. To correct that, just retag the project, and you are OK again. It's very small in size and extremely fast and lightweight.

 

Code::Blocks

It's my second tool of favor, equally with Eclipse CDT (well eclipse wins a bit, because it supports auto generated doxygen tags in comments, while C::B doesn't). When I write about doxygen tags auto generation I think of auto-completing these tags after writing "/**" and pressing ENTER. The editor creates the function documentation block with parameters for you, so you don't have to type it all. Maybe it can be done by some templates, but I would like to have it right away. Despite some problems I have encountered while using it (Copy and Paste problems in xfce) I like it very much and use it very often. One of the features which I like is importing of VS workspaces, solutions and projects. It's very convenient when you work on some VS project, but you don't like VisualStudio. Code completion works fine. Flyovers of function and its parameters after placing mouse cursor over the function is very convenient.

 

Eclipse CDT The same as C::B or even better now. I had some experience with it some time ago, when the CDT was in it's early stages. I dropped it right away, it was not a great tool then with so many errors, problems and missing features. It was really hard to work with. The project matured and I gave it another chance lately. It's really a good tool to recommend. First of all, for all java developers, they don't have to learn new IDE when they need to switch to C or C++. Code completion works right from the start. In the old days ctags had to be configured in order to have code completion. I take it as a great improvement. Doxygen documentation tags are supported. Even in the old days the debugger was quite good and it's even better now. It has very nice memory viewer. The debugged supports gdb only if I am correct. Code annotations in editor with warnings/errors that might/will occur during compilation is the very nice feature. You see right away that there is something wrong with the code.

Eclipse has also great SVN client available as a plugin: Subversive.

 

CodeLite I haven't played with it too much, but I will surely get back to it and give it another try. I removed it after I started to lack things from C::B, but maybe it was too quick decision It has more modern GUI than C::B so at first look it looks very nice. I don't remember now which features of C::B I was missing, so please forgive me not mentioning them here. But maybe I just didn't turn them on, because I didn't know how to do it CodeLite is the IDE that should run low on resources, and I think that in comparison to C::B (again ) it is better. The same thing like in C:B, no support for doxygen autogenerated coments.

 

Please share your opinions here. Unfortunately I don't have time to write more, maybe I will have time for it and I will update this post in the future There are still some IDEs to be described, like: kdevelop, netbeans,