Graelig, you did say that an IDE was a necessity. Necessity = something that is necessary.
That you didn't mean it, or decide to back out, that is not my concern.
And, you say that "it's just my opinion", which is correct.
What you write in your posts is probably your opinion, am I right?
I said it's almost a necessity, which I think is true. You can technically call VC++ without the IDE but why bother? You can't really set up make on windows, you have to use something like cygwin, and that is a giant pain.
As for my opinion, sure. But it is one that is easy to support.
Setting up a build environment without an IDE is not only easy but also much faster in my experience, if you are using a tool like CMake, SCons, and the like.
I didn't say anything about writing a build chain in batch files, for Christ sakes!!
I said batch build. Kicking off a build without cracking open the IDE.
I have a growing suspicion that you are splitting hairs with me?
Disclaimer:
This post contains opinions and observations and is not intended to be universally applicable. It just tries to broaden the picture by adding to the topic at hand.
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Also, when I say that I am an Emacs user you seem to automatically assume that I am using it for C++ development, and that is extremely far from the truth. Have you read the previous posts in this topic, you would have learned that I am using Sublime Text now because I, like you, grew tired of being stuck in a configuration mire. Emacs is awesome, but Sublime Text gets the job done faster ((maybe not as fun, but definitely faster)).
For programming I use CMake and a combination of VS/QtCreator/Command-line.
I am not in a corporate environment, of course. So I am at liberty here. ;)
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The topic of the thread is IDE vs Editor. So that is what I am discussing. Using things like makefiles is a part of using an editor, if you are using it for programming. If you are not talking about programming then you have gotten off topic.
You can't really do that in windows except in some goofy way like cygwin that's hard to maintain, and will wind up with you writing 'windows' programs that only run on cygwin.
Cmake is pretty awful. That is one reason I did not stick with Ogre. You have an extra build step, and at the end you still have to build things.
If you are programming in windows as your main dev it makes little sense not to use an IDE and it's very hard to do without one. If you are programming on multiple platforms I can imagine trying to do something that builds them all, using scripts or a build system. I think you are probably wasting your time though, you may be able to use cmake to immediately generate SOMETHING but it won't really be anything that I would consider using for my builds. Plus you don't necessarily have the full control of your project.
So you use Ogre or something similar and you get stuck with something crappy. You spend a ton of time editing it and though theoretically you might get it into the project usually you just wind up with a big maintenance problem.