You are entirely out to lunch Graelig.

It's a pity that you can't figure out how to invoke nmake from the shell and that CMake is giving you a hard time and that you find it difficult to function without an IDE, but I guess you will survive.

You are asking why I would like to not use an IDE, and the reason is that it is much, much faster to just fire off a batch of commands instead of opening the IDE (takes a while to load), load the solution and all projects (takes even longer to load), wait for intellisense to do it's parsing, and then finally activate the project that you want to build, select the right configuration and hit build. Whew, that's a lot of waiting and clicking, isn't it?

Of course, when you are coding, then an IDE is great, because then you actually need the intelli-sense and the nice UI. Not when you just want to configure and build the damn thing. :)

I am not off-topic: if you are using an editor for programming then you need to call the build tools (nmake/make) from the shell. Could be Emacs, Sublime Text, Notepad++,..

Code::Blocks (which is an IDE) does call out to MinGW or Microsoft's build tools too, it's not as obvious as when you do it manually.

Yes, that was my point: you don't need to open the IDE to build.

I am building my framework/application/game frequently without coding to test that it builds in different configurations, but I also open the IDE to code (obviously) and then I choose either QtCreator or Visual Studio depending on what kind of work I do.

Swiftcoder: I know that you hate CMake, and I love it. And that we can never meet

It's just ironic, I think, because amongst SCons, Premake and CMake and a lot of other build script tools, it is only CMake that has a dependency management system built on top of it. It's called Bicode, and I know of several other projects that predates that.

But let's just let it rest for now.

Vim's main weakness is its "QuickFix" list for jumping to compile-time errors; C++ can generate monster reports which are nigh impossible to follow in vim. But I only recently discovered the :copen command which I'm sure will help a lot. Having youcompleteme highlight most errors before I compile is a huge help too. But some errors can't easily be detected until the full build process due to template instantiation, and those tend to be the biggest monsters.

I'm a little late to the party. Sorry. If you use make or CMake to generate the make files, and use the built in :make vim command, it will automatically jump to the first error in the code, even without using the :copen stuff.

As far as editors, I've not used XCode. I have used JEdit, Eclipse (Java/C++), NetBeans, IntelliJ, QtCreator, and Visual Studio 6 all the way to vs 2013. You can't get tied to an editor at work, because sometimes you have to use what everyone else is using. I prefer vim, but I've just started down that road this year, so who knows.

I love vim, and I using it for everything, on Windows 7 and Ubuntu. But at work, it is awkward when someone else is reviewing some code and then they try to type something. It's funny to watch, but not very helpful. I've usually got a Visual Studio or QtCreator open in the background so they will feel more comfortable.

Well, whatever. I don't think anyone can really think it's much of an option on windows unless they have a 'ideological' reason to want to. At any rate I spent tons of time on it, I won't waste another second bothering to try.