Yesterday i started getting into linux development and tried a few IDEs, but not a single one i tried was good (CLion, Visual Studio Code, Geany, Emacs).

Either its incredible slow or does not run at all or miss some important features i need.

Is there no C++ IDE for Linux with following capabilties:

- Fast searching of functions and types (Symbol search, not a ctrl+f search)

- Fast and stable editor with the ability to increase the font size

- Supports mouse as well

- Does not require a shitton of memory (Clion needs 4 GB just to startup and it explodes when you start to use it)

- Ability to jump directly to a function, type, variable etc. (Ctrl + Mouse click)

- Runs well in a virtual machine with 2 Cores, 8 GB of Ram (Linux wont run natively on any of my machines, so i have no other choice)

- Visual debugger with breakpoints, step into, step over, etc.

At first glance visual studio code seems to be the best bet, but i couldnt get it to work using G++ and GDB at all (Do you have experience with that?)

CLion looked the best so far, but it used up all of the memory of my virtual machine and was still running extremely slow - even after giving the VM a total of 8 GB of a total of 16 GB ram, but it has other issues as well:

- No support for including external files into the project at all - you simply have to copy it into the project folder and copy it back when you are done which is a nuisance

- Symbol search does not work at all - it wont find any function/types/variables i search in

- Forces me to use CMake (I can live with it)

- Costs about 100 bucks

I tried normal text editors too, like geany and emacs but really i cant code with such tools anymore. I cant get productive with such barebone tools. The last time i used raw text editors was < 2000 and we have 2017.

52 minutes ago, Zipster said:

I've been using VisualGDB for a little over a year now, and while it isn't perfect (or free), nothing beats being able to use Visual Studio seamlessly across multiple environments. Just having access to the debugger is worth the price alone, let alone the entire VS featureset and then some. 

Oh VisualGDB looks very interesting. Never heard about that. I will give that a try.

Question, how does this work? It looks like it uses SSH to connect to the linux system isn´t it? How is X handled there, VNC?

49 minutes ago, Shaarigan said:

I have had done some research on the same topic as I used Visual Studio Code some time before (and uninstalled it 5 minutes later because it is a shame to call this Visual Studio) so I came up with 3 alternatives to choose from after all the discussion about customizing the "on board" tools with plugins (what could also be a life time task) like vm and whatever you have access to:

Code::Blocks seems to have anything you could need to start even when it looks a bit old fashioned

Eclipse playes on the market as long as modern Visual Studio does but I personally think it has to complicated UI and features hided anywhere in the menus. Used it for Java and found it horrible but well thats an opinion

CodeLite will by now be the choice for me. It offers a good UI and has also plugins to customize it

At the end, one will say so or so, thats Linux/Unix, one thousand solutions for the same task

Edit:

Forgot about the (not used nor tested by me yet) promised features from Visual Studio 2015/2017 to be able to run and debug code on Linux using a SSH connection (or else)

I know CodeBlocks, i used this in the past - but it was awful unstable in that time, especially the project configuration. I dont expect it to be magically better. But i can give it another try.

Eclipse, yeah... i have tons of java experience, so i know Eclipse very well - it has great refactoring tools and good search, but well it is very slow and my attempts to marry it with C++ and Linux was extremely painfully and very unstable. But maybe it is magically better and fast, but i dont expect that. As a matter of mact, i expect the opposite: Slower and more unstable than before - but well i give it another try too.

CodeLite was the next on my list i wanted to really try, because this looks promising.

But really i need to get a way to install linux natively on my notebook or my main system beside windows 10. My last attempts a few months ago, was just black screens on all 3 systems i own, for almost every distro i tried (Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, Arch, etc.). Oddly enough not a single linux distro wont run on my notebook in virtualbox with windows 10 as host.

I am sure if i would upload a recorded video showing how i "try" getting linux up and running in one of my machines, i would get thousands of view.

I just want to recommend CodeLite too since it does most (not all) of the things you require from an IDE.

I also heard good things from KDevelop, but never tried it myself.

21 hours ago, lawnjelly said:

My vote goes to QT Creator (I've tried codelite, code blocks, eclipse, vs code, but not CLion which I've heard is not bad).

As a long time visual studio user it has now totally replaced it for me since I migrated to linux 5 months ago, and I totally prefer it now. It is far faster and more responsive than VS, which is a big thing for me, and it feels like a much more solid well written application.

There are only 2 areas (in *my* everyday use) that I consider VS to be better:

1) Debugger. QT creator debugging feels less polished. It works, but the tooltip watch windows are a bit dodgy, and it could do with some colour.

2) Lack of folders in classview. I had to resort to using namespaces to organise classes.

Is this page (https://www1.qt.io/download/) QT Creator? If so then QT creator is not free anymore, which is unfortunate.