I use gedit when I need to do unicode (UTF-8) editing, web pages and such. For that it's great.

Eclipse is the only Linux ide that hasn't crashed on me during the first 15 minutes, nor has it ever left itself or the project files in an inconsistent state. This may sound harsh but Eclipse, even with the not-so-stellar CDT, feels like a real tool in comparison to the other toys mentioned here. And I've tried most of them several times.

- KDevelop felt like it had two new features with new twenty bugs added for each bug fixed. All in all a confusing mess where half of the things soft-of worked if the stars were right.
- Anjuta seemed to have a broken design. Too many things were hard-coded and getting the whole glued-together mess to crash was rather easy.
- Code::Blocks had a broken Linux build system that I had to hack around. When I got it to work, it was quite a bit better than either KDevelop or Anjuta, but still not too difficult to crash or confuse. I admit I haven't tried it in a while, though. Besides Eclipse CDT, this would be a project I would have high hopes for if the latest release weren't almost a year old.
- MinGW Developer Studio felt like such a lame and primitive copy of MSVC it made me feel bad for using it. It appears to be unmaintained too. It is simple and as such does not crash as easily as the others, though. Then again it doesn't have many advantages over a simple editor either.


Unless you are writing Java, editors and consoles will probably give you the most flexibility and the least amount of frustration. Unfortunately this means you have to live without out-of-the-box code completion, but AFAIK MSVC is the only system capable of doing that properly for C++ anyway. CDT seems to be getting there, though.

Using no IDE also gives you the advantage of scriptable build systems. For example, you can have your makefiles unzip and compile an external library, compile and run code to generate more code out of tables, compile and run test cases etc. without having to look after the IDE when it gets confused.

I usually just use gedit with the external tools plugin and hand built makefiles. It's worked well for me, but most of my linux projects are rather small. I doubt that solution would scale well to larger projects.

Quote: Original post by 255
Eclipse is the only Linux ide that hasn't crashed on me during the first 15 minutes, nor has it ever left itself or the project files in an inconsistent state. This may sound harsh but Eclipse, even with the not-so-stellar CDT, feels like a real tool in comparison to the other toys mentioned here. And I've tried most of them several times.

what os and java platform(s) is this on? i find it hard to believe that the latest eclipse with cdt can be as bad as what i saw today. i probably have to fix something.

I've used Eclipse on both Windows and Linux as per project requirements a few months ago, and it was enough to make me doubt I'll ever be willing to use it again. Eclipse was probably the single most painful IDE experience I've had: It just thinks it knows more about the project than the programmer, and most of the time I felt like I was fighting the IDE instead of using it. Try doing anything with the project's files outside of the IDE and watch it hit the panic button. Stuff like that meant making it cooperate with Subversion was unnecessarily painful.

Creating real GUI tools that run well in all cases takes hard work and dedication to annoying details over a long time, by people with a certain skill set. Open Source model seems to lack when it comes to getting this working, unless there is a corporate sponsor that kicks in money to make it happen. Meanwhile, the kernel and drivers are mostly all stable, because that's a different kind of work, that seems to attract a lot more successful projects.


On UNIX, I use vim, and The Non-Recursive Make File.

Unsure if this merits a new thread... I'm in the *exact* situation as the original poster.

Despite years of dependence on ms devstudio, I'll go with the editor & makefiles to start my linux programming journey...

but what do you guys use for debugging? (or don't linux progammers write any bugs?) ;)

btw, thanks to hplus for the makefile tips (and NAT-punch too, as I recall).

-fa

I use the GNU debugger and Valgrind.

Thanks for all the responses. So far I am enjoying code::blocks quite a bit. I am using the GDB debugger with it and havent had any crashes or problems yet. Instead of doing a custom build I just downloaded the latest nightly build deb package and installed that.