Alright, there have been A LOT of posts of different IDEs for Linux. Here's a short summary of the most popular ones. NOTE: Let me know if you have any other IDEs to add. And just in case: Please, don't start any flamewars such as "vi vs. emacs" or other sh*t. Thank you ;) IDEs: KDevelop QT-based C++ IDE (syntax highlighting for other languages). Part of the KDE project. Anjuta GTK-based C++ IDE. MinGW Studio A crossplatform C++ IDE (Windows and GNU/Linux), but unfortunately the development has halted. Eclipse A crossplatform Java-based IDE. It is more aimed towards Java development but it also has support for C++ development. Code::Blocks IDE A crossplatform C++ IDE (Windows and GNU/Linux). Borland C++ Builder X A crossplatform C++ IDE. Personal edition is available for free. Kylix The Linux counterpart for Delphi. Personal edition is available for free. IDLE A Python IDE. MonoDevelop A free .NET IDE. jGRASP a lightweight development environment, created specifically to provide automatic generation of software visualizations Text editors: Console emacs vi jed pico nano GUI xemacs kate scite nedit gvim [Edited by - tentoid on September 1, 2005 3:24:50 PM]

You forgot gvim and xemacs under "GUI." There's also pico and nano, among others. Ofcourse, there are so many unix text editors it wouldn't be very productive listing them all.

i'd also include NEdit as text editor for programmers. i use it all the time. it's spartanic but in combination with endeavour2 a nice thing for people not wanna bloat their system just for deving.

I think what would be good in this thread would be a few objective reviews of the software based on personal experience. I'll write a couple when I get time.

Quote: Original post by evolutional
I think what would be good in this thread would be a few objective reviews of the software based on personal experience. I'll write a couple when I get time.

Yeah, reviews would be nice! Would it be any good if this thread was stickified?

I can review emacs/xemacs although I'm not sure I'm entirely objective...

Anyway, people seem to either love or hate emacs, I'll list the arguments on both sides:

Hate
* Hundreds of keyboard shortcuts to remember - steep learning curve
* Bloated (was more of an issue 10 years ago, it is fast enough on anything made in the last 4 years)
* Not very user-friendly
* Associated with raving GNU-zealots
* Emacs lisp (scripting language) is rather weird for people who are not used to lisp
* Integration with compiling and debugging is less seamless than in more modern IDE's
* Many third-party modules are quite buggy

Love
* Powerful
* Contains it's own scripting language -> can be extended
* Support for editing lots of different languages and doing other stuff - if not out-of-box then with third party modules
* Self-documenting (once you figure out the self-documentation system)
* Your hands do not have to leave the main part of the keyboard - ever
* Portable

XEmacs and Emacs are pretty much the same system, normal Emacs runs in a window too when started in X (or MS Windows) these days.

You forgot Borland C++ Builder X.
This one is great, tons of advanced features. Cross-platform, Windows, Linux, Solaris... You can use pretty much any compiler you want with it.
http://www.borland.com/cbuilderx/
The personal version is a free download if you register.

Then there is also Kylix from Borland, not that I like it very much but still...
Linux versions of Borland C++ Builder and Delphi. Nowhere near as robust as their Windows counterparts.
http://www.borland.com/kylix/
The personal version is a free download in this case too.

I'm a fairly new user to linux, I've been around for soon two years, but I've grown to be a permanent user and I've tried different distros and IDE's, and I guess I could post a bit about the IDE´s (basicly I've gone from red hat 9 suse -> mandrake -> mepis.org, and I will probably switch to ubuntu linux at some stage, perhaps then next release is out, supporting x.org). I'm a ex windows user btw, if that should bring some clearity when I make references.

When I first came to the linux world, I basicly only knew of vi, emacs and jedit. Since I'm a fanboy of the GUI's and haven't really got fond of emacs (which I understand that you can be very much, so please don't flame me). I used emacs and vi for some part at university but I always found it a bit of going a step back towards DOS, where I really kicked ass with basic, pascal, c++ (watcom) and assembler a few years back.

I have nothing bad to say about jedit really, it worked really well for me in a while, but there is only so much time you are willing to spwnd within a text editor (although graphical) until you want to use a IDE instead. When I was switching to Linux I was doing more html than C++ and a note should be said, jedit is superb for editing html. With some plugins (which is the most beutiful plugin manager I've ever seen in a project I reccon) it really was a kick ass application.

When I should switch from jedit to a IDE I heard a lot of options, including the emacs fanboys who had been using emacs since the dawn of time and it seems it's about as hard to convert them to a GUI application as it is to destroy the one ring so I gave that up. Basicly you could say that rather being inspired to use emacs I was drawn away from it, perhaps a good tip for the future boys!.

First IDE I tried with was KDevelop(version 2.something I recall). It was using the autoconf system which I was not. I just wanted to use my own Makefiles. It took some serious amount of time figuring out the KDevelop way of dealing with that for me, but when I understand the Project->Import Project it was of course piece of cake. During this time KDevelop crashed on me frequently at bootups and I had to remove some file just to make that work. Totally retarded and irritating I must say, so I started to look for other alternatives.

At this point I was not so active with coding, maybe because of the editor, maybe because of my life, I don't remember right now, but a solid editor is a must.

So I installed Anjuta. I tried some things here too, I think I had some problems with the Makefiles here too, perhaps that's so much better now when I'm starting to understand automake/autoconf, I don't know, but there was more things that I didn't like about the IDE, too bad I never write down what I don't like about distros and applications because honestly, I can't remember.

I thing I did go back to jedit just to be able to code without swearing for a few weeks.

Then I understood how I should install KDevelop3. Since I was originally pretty fond of this IDE as for editing, I gave it another try. I must say I was pretty turned around. It worked without irritating bugs and the featureset was grown.
This is the distro I use frequently now, and it has developed even further since I started using it. Check www.kdevelop.org for feature lists, but what I really should point out is great syntax highlighting and auto-hints and it now has some kind of pre-warning system which highlights a row if there is a typo or something obvious to the compiler. Nowadays KDevelop is pretty much like using Visual Studio plus the Visual Assist plugin, but I might say, the value/price ration is way better.

Since I installed KDevelop I never even looked at the other alternatives out there, I'm perfectly happy with my choice (at least for now).

For newbies, I would really recommend this IDE and to use together with ubuntu linux which has gone a far way as for usabiliy from what I have seen.
And a last pointer, don't give up. You didn't learn Windows/MSVS in a weekend so don't claim Linux is all bad because you dont "get it" at first look.

I hope you found my answer useful.

Albert "thec" Sandberg

Hello!

I can recommend Eclipse. In its latest Version (3.x) and the CDT Plugin, it is an excellent IDE. One feature i was missing in MOST other IDEs is the integrated version control (CVS / Subversion ). CDT provides a great debugger (needs gdb). I use Eclipse with gcc (Linux) and MinGW (Windows).

Cirdan

kwrite, console, bash (and other interpreted langs like perl), make is my IDE.