Student in college, free access to Visual Studio for (at least) the next three full years. I've also been using Visual Studio since VS2003, so I'm extremely familiar with it and not much else. Honestly, I've been using the (absolutely incredible!) plugin/extension Visual Assist X for a while, typically finding "ways" to get my trial period back every time it runs out, and I'm getting sick of the run-around. I don't have a lot of money or else I'd just buy a student license; so that, coupled with an increased desire to move towards multi-platform solutions has driven me to check other IDE's out...


Main things drawing me to Visual Studio: Nice environment. Exceptional debugger. Previous experience. Visual Assist X
Main things drawing me away from it: No (simple) multi-platform support. Visual Assist X is pricey. Mediocre out-of-box code completion/syntax highlighting

That's where I'm hung up at the moment. I love Visual Studio and I almost can't imagine using it without Visual Assist X, so it's going to be a tough decision to make. I've used Eclipse a lot in the past 3 or 4 years for Java stuff at school, and I know it supports C++ to some extent so that's in the cards but I'm not familiar enough with the code completion, syntax highlighting and debuggers involved to decide on my own. I also am not too too fond of the Eclipse environment itself, although if its C++ features stand up to its Java features I might have to reconsider. Another IDE I've heard a lot of good things about is NetBeans. This is one I haven't used at all, and have very few opinions about. I've heard that for a C++ IDE it's exceptionally good for people used to Visual Studio, but maybe someone here who's made the transition in one direction or the other can give me a little more insight into that.

So it seems my main three choices are to stay with Visual Studio 2010, or move to either Eclipse or NetBeans. Any suggestions? (Telling me I should just stick with what I know is acceptable, I'm still just thinking about it)

If you are developing on windows, visual studio is the best choice. There are not even any runners up. This is coming from an anti-Microsoft guy too.
Linux development, most likely codeblocks

I was just going to mention I had a bit of experience with Code::Blocks back in like 2007 or so. Seemed decent at the time but just didn't compare.

A quick look at NetBeans after installing it seems to indicate that I'll need to install Cygwin or something similar to get a compiler working on Windows, which is something I'd prefer not to do...

Is there really NOTHING else worth using??? It's such a shame that there aren't any decent alternatives to Visual Assist X for C++.

Not an intuitive choice, but QT4 creator is a full IDE with compiler and debugger and nobody forces you to actually use QT in your programs. If I had to pick one (after learning to hate Eclipse for many small things) that would be my only choice for Linux and even when doing QT apps on Windows I prefer it over VC.

It's true I hadn't considered QT's IDE either....my experience with the QT libraries as a whole has been rather negative, but I suppose that doesn't limit the IDE from being decent.

I'll check that one out, thanks.

I use Eclipse's C++ IDE on my Linux box and its been the best to me so far. It has alot of plugins that make working easier (including SVN/CVS manager for collaboration). SO If your looking at Linux I definitely recommend Eclipse. For Windows (I too am anti-Microsoft) hands down its Visual Studio.

On Linux, KDevelop 4 offers some pretty advanced C++ code completion features. I've never used Visual Assist X, so I don't know how it compares but it's a lot better than what I've seen from VS Express and Eclipse CDT.