C++ IDE for Linux? [closed]

Question

I want to expand my programming horizons to Linux. A good, dependable basic toolset is important, and what is more basic than an IDE?

I could find these SO topics:

• Lightweight IDE for linux and
• What tools do you use to develop C++ applications on Linux?

I'm not looking for a lightweight IDE. If an IDE is worth the money, then I will pay for it, so it need not be free.

My question, then:

What good, C++ programming IDE is available for Linux?

The minimums are fairly standard: syntax highlighting, code completion (like intellisense or its Eclipse counterpart) and integrated debugging (e.g., basic breakpoints).

I have searched for it myself, but there are so many that it is almost impossible to separate the good from the bads by hand, especially for someone like me who has little C++ coding experience in Linux. I know that Eclipse supports C++, and I really like that IDE for Java, but is it any good for C++ and is there something better?

The second post actually has some good suggestions, but what I am missing is what exactly makes the sugested IDE so good for the user, what are its (dis)advantages?

Maybe my question should therefore be:

What IDE do you propose (given your experiences), and why?

Answer 1

Shorter answer is: choosing whatever "editor" you like, then use GDB console or a simple GDB front end to debug your application. The debuggers come with fancy IDEs such as Netbeans sucks for C/C++. I use Netbeans as my editor, and Insight and GDB console as my debugger.

With insight, you have a nice GUI and the raw power of GDB.

As soon as you get used to GDB commands, you will start to love it since you can do things you will never be able to do using an GUI. You can use even use Python as your script language if you are using GDB 7 or newer version.

Most people here paid more attentions to the "Editors" of the IDEs. However, if you are developing a large project in C/C++, you could easily spend more than 70% of your time on the "debuggers". The debuggers of the fancy IDEs are at least 10 years behind Visual Studio. For instance, Netbenas has very similar interfaces with Visual Studio. But its debugger has a number of disadvantages compared to Visual Studio.

1. Very slow to display even a array with only a few hundreds of elements
2. No highlighting for changed value ( By default, visual studio shows changed values in the watch windows in red)
3. Very limited ability to show memory.
4. You cannot modify the source code then continue to run. If a bug takes a long time to hit, you would like to change the source and apply the changes live and continue to run your application.
5. You cannot change the "next statement" to run. In Visual Studio, you can use "Set Next Statement" to change how your application runs. Although this feature could crash your application if not used properly, but it will save you a lot of time. For instance, if you found the state of your application is not correct, but you do not know what caused the problems, you might want to rerun a certain region of the your source codes without restarting your application.
6. No built-in support for STL such as vector, list, deque and map etc.
7. No watch points. You need to have this feature, when you need to stop your application right at the point a variable is changed. Intel based computers have hardware watch points so that the watch points will not slow down your system. It might takes many hours to find some hard-to-find bugs without using watch points. "Visual Studio" calls "watch pointer" as "Data BreakPoint".

The list can be a lot longer.

I was so frustrated by the disadvantages of the Netbeans or other similar IDEs, so that I started to learn GDB itself. I found GDB itself are very powerful. GDB does not have all the "disadvantages" mentioned above. Actually, GDB is very powerful, it is even better than Visual Studio in many ways. Here I just show you a very simple example.

For instance, you have a array like:

struct IdAndValue
{
  int ID;
  int value;
};


IdAndValue IdAndValues[1000];

When your application stops, and you want to examine the data in IdAndValues. For instance, if you want to find the ordinals and values in the array for a particular "ID", you can create a script like the following:

define PrintVal 
set $i=0
printf "ID = %d\n", $arg0
while $i<1000
  if IdAndValues[$i].ID == $arg0
    printf "ordinal = %d, value = %d\n", $i, IdAndValues[$i].vaue
    set $i++
  end
end
end

You can use all variables in your application in the current context, your own variables (in our example, it is $i), arguments passed (in our example, it is $arg0) and all GDB commands (built-in or user defined).

Use PrintVal 1 from GDB prompt to print out values for ID "1"

By the way, NetBeans does come with a GDB console, but by using the console, you could crash Netbeans. And I believe that is why the console is hidden by default in NetBeans

Answer 2

SlickEdit. I have used and loved SlickEdit since 2005, both on Windows and on Linux. I also have experience working in Visual Studio (5, 6, 2003, 2005) and just with Emacs and command line. I use SlickEdit with external makefiles, some of my teammates use SlickEdit, others use Emacs/vi. I do not use the integrated debugger, integrated version control, integrated build system: I generally find too much integration to be real pain. SlickEdit is robust (very few bugs), fast and intuitive. It is like a German car, a driver's car.

The newest versions of SlickEdit seem to offer many features that do not interest me, I am a little worried that the product will become bloated and diluted in the future. For now (I use V13.0) it is great.

Answer 3

Checkout Netbeans, it's written in Java so you'll have the same environment regardless of your OS, and it supports a lot more than just C++.

I'm not going to try to convince you, because I think IDEs can be a very personal choice. For me it improves my productivity by being fast, supporting the languages I code in and has the standard features you'd expect from an IDE.

Answer 4

I quite like Ultimate++'s IDE. It has some features that were designed to use with their own library (which, BTW, is quite a nice toolkit if you don't want to buy on either GTK+ or QT) but it works perfectly well with general C++ projects. It provides decent code completion, good syntax colouring, integrated debugging, and all other features most modern IDEs support.

Answer 5

I recommend you read The Art Of UNIX Progranmming. It will frame your mind into using the environment as your IDE.

Answer 6

make + vim + gdb = one great IDE