I ask this question every so often and am usually disappointed by the results, so I don't expect much this time. ;) But I will try anyway. Basically, coming from a background of Visual C++, I can't find a decent equivalent for my Mandrake installation. Last time I looked, KDevelop seemed to be the best of a bad bunch but it's still a nightmare. If I want project management it expects me to go through all the ./configure foolishness that I don't want. I just want a simple makefile but it won't manage that for me, apparently. Also, when I ask it to make an SDL project, I expect it to be able to compile that project, not tell me that it can't find "sdl.h". I installed these things from the distro's RPMs so it's not like the lib is hidden in some obscure location. I eventually found out that it seems to have forgotten the sdl-config lines. Kdevelop's project configuration is only the thinnest of layers over gcc, requiring me to know the flag syntax for adding libraries and so on. I can't even find how to add a file to the project - the docs tell me there's an automake manager window, which I can't find. Finally, it's segfaulted on me twice in the last half hour. Surely it has to get better than this? I'm quite happy to drop automake, doxygen, cvs/svn support (which annoyingly clutters the Kdevelop context menu despite me explicitly asking for no such support for my current project), etc etc, just to get something that works with minimum effort and will manage a trivial makefile for me without creating almost 20 different files before I even start coding. I'm tempted to drop back down to text mode and use the Jam build tool for makefiles but I've no idea how well that'll work when it comes to using multiple libraries.

MonoDevelop is, admittedly buggy, but very much on the right track, but it sounds like you don't want a C# IDE. For C#, last time I used it I found Anjuta sufficient, if not excellent. At least it seemed to manage your makefiles and libraries for you and give you some syntax highlighting, code collapsing and some other features. Code completion was curiously absent. Still, check it out: anjuta.sf.net.

I know what you mean. I really want to be able to do all my programming under Linux but I can't get SDL to work properly with any of the IDEs. That and games are the only reasons I still use Windows. Dev-c++ is just soooo much quicker and easier than using KDevelop or Anjuta.

I must say though, both Linux IDEs do have lots of cool features but it's just that it's a real pain doing even a simple program.

Have you tried MinGW Studio? I use it for all my Linux SDL programming and it's a great IDE.

Sorry, I should have mentioned explicitly that I'm after C++ stuff. I tried MinGW Studio in the last 2 minutes while I was waiting for replies and it won't run on my system, saying it can't find a certain library.


I'd like to use Linux for my coding because I'm currently working on an OpenGL project, and running OpenGL apps on my Win98 partition eventually screws up the system with stack overflows.

(PS. Apologies if you don't see any paragraphs in these posts -I'm using Konqueror to post with and there seems to be some bug with it/Gamedev.net where the carriage returns are getting chewed up.)

Quote: Original post by darookie
Have you tried MinGW Studio? I use it for all my Linux SDL programming and it's a great IDE.

Thanks darookie, I'll give it a try.

I got frustrated with Anjuta badly managing stuff, so I dropped to the basics: glade, gedit, and a terminal.

glade took care of creating all the makefile.am/configure madness, and I can just edit code with gedit, perhaps add a new sourcefile into the makefile.am and then just 'clear && make && ./prog' in the terminal.

There's only three negatives:
1. You have to know how to fiddle with a makefile.am SLIGHTLY, jsut enough to add new files to the project yourself. Pretty simple.
2. Compile errors mean you have to find the line yourself, you can't click on the line in the terminal and expect gedit to jump to that spot...
3. No "Intellisense" or whateer you call it. Fine with me, it always just annoyed me anyway.

What version of KDevelope are you using (just curious). I am using 3.0 and it works great with SDL. I think they are up to 3.2 or 3.3 now. I did have 2.3 a while back and it was a total nightmare.

I'm 'using' KDevelop 3.0 on Mandrake 10.0. SDL projects don't work out of the box until you add in the relevant sdl-config lines to the project settings. It just segfaulted on me a 3rd time just for browsing the project menu, perhaps because the project wasn't loaded yet. :)

Hmmm. I didn't even have to set my directories. When kDevelope setup on the first run it did it all. I am using Fedora Core 2.