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]

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.

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'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