What is the best IDE for C Development Why use Emacs over an IDE

Question

so as per one of my previous questions  I m brushing up on my C skills   My question is  what do people use for developing C   Lots of people use Emacs  and have done so for years  but is it better to learn emacs than just use an IDE such as Geany or KDevelop   Would also be interested to hear from those still using emacs  and why they use it over other apps   Please note that I m only really interested in the free IDEs   editors   EDIT   Thanks for posting links which answer some of my questions  but I guess what I m really wondering about is   Whether learning to edit using emacs   vim and compiling   debugging using the gcc-toolchain is worth it instead of just using an IDE  and why   What are peoples reasons for not migrating to an IDE   Has anyone moved from terminal-centric development to IDE development  and why did they move

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Emacs would be better if it had a text editor in it     -

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If you re on Windows then it s a total no-brainer  Get Visual C   Express

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I have used Eclipse with the CDT plug in quite successfully

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Emacs is an IDE   edit  OK  I ll elaborate   What is an IDE   As a starting point  let s expand the acronym  Integrated Development Environment   To analyze this  I start from the end   An environment is  generally speaking  the part of the world that surrounds the point of view   In this case  it is what we see on our monitor  perhaps hear from our speakers  and manipulate through our keyboard  and perhaps a mouse    Development is what we want to do in this environment  its purpose  if you want   We use the environment to develop software   This defines what subparts we need  an editor  an interface to the REPL  resp  the compiler  an interface to the debugger  and access to online documentation  this list may not be exhaustive    Integrated means that all parts of the environment are somehow under a uniform surface   In an IDE  we can access and use the different subparts with a minimum of switching  we don t have to leave our defined environment   This integration lets the different subparts interact better   For example  the editor can know about what language we write in  and give us symbol autocompletion  jump-to-definition  auto-indentation  syntax highlighting  etc    It can get information from the compiler  automatically jump to errors  and highlight them   In most  if not all IDEs  the editor is naturally at the heart of the development process   Emacs does all this  it does it with a wide range of languages and tasks  and it does it with excellence  since it is seamlessly expandable by the user wherever he misses anything   Counterexample   you could develop using something like Notepad  access documentation through Firefox and XPdf  and steer the compiler and debugger from a shell   This would be a Development Environment  but it would not be integrated

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I started off by using IDEs  Microsoft or not  Then  while working on QNX some long time ago  I was forced to do with a text editor   compiler linker  Now I prefer this simple combination      a syntax highlighting editor   C compiler and linker cli   make      to any IDEs  even if environment allows for them  The reasons are  for me   it s everywhere  If you program in C  you do have the compiler  and usually you can get yourself an editor  The first thing I do      I get myself nedit on Linux or Notepad   on Windows  I would go with vi  but GUI editors provide for a better fonts  and that is important when you look at code all day  you can program remotely  via ssh  when you need to  And it does help a lot sometimes to be able to ssh into the target and do some quick things there  it keeps me close to CLI  preferably UNIX Linux CLI  So all the commands are on my fingertips  and when I need them I don t have to go read a reference book  And UNIX CLI can do things IDEs often can t      because their developers didn t think you d need them  most importantly  it is very much like seeing the Matrix in raw code  I operate files  so I m forced to keep them manageable  I m finding things in my code manually  which makes me keep it simple and organized  I do Config Management explicitly  so I know when I m synced and how  I know my Makefiles because I write them  and they only do what I tell them to  if you wonder if that works in  quot really big projects quot       it does work  and the bigger the project the more performance it gains me   when people ask me to look at their code  I don t have to learn the IDE they use

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If you are looking for a free  nice looking  cross-platform editor  try Komodo Edit  It is not as powerful as Komodo IDE  however that isn t free  See feature chart   Another free  extensible editor is jEdit  Crossplatform as it is 100  pure Java  Not the fastest IDE on earth  but for Java actually very fast  very flexible  not that nice looking though   Both have very sophisticated code folding  syntax highlighting  for all languages you can think of   and are very flexible regarding configuring it for you personal needs  jEdit is BTW very easy to extend to add whatever feature you may need there  it has an ultra simple scripting language  that looks like Java  but is actually  scripted

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How come nobody mentions Bloodshed Devc    Havent used it in a while  but i learnt c c   on it  very similar to MS Visual c

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I ve moved from a terminal text-editor make environment to Eclipse for most of my projects  Spanning from C and C    to Java and Python to name few languages I am currently working with   The reason was simply productivity  I could not afford spending time and effort on keeping all projects  in my head  as other things got more important    There are benefits of using the  hardcore  approach  terminal  - such as that you have a much thinner layer between yourself and the code which allows you to be a bit more productive when you re all  inside  the project and everything is on the top of your head  But I don t think it is possible to defend that way of working just for it s own sake when your mind is needed elsewhere   Usually when you work with command line tools you will frequently have to solve a lot of boilerplate problems that will keep you from being productive  You will need to know the tools in detail to fully leverage their potentials  Also maintaining a project will take a lot more effort  Refactoring will lead to updates in make-files  etc   To summarize  If you only work on one or two projects  preferably full-time without too much distractions   terminal based coding  can be more productive than a full blown IDE  However  if you need to spend your thinking energy on something more important an IDE is definitely the way to go in order to keep productivity   Make your choice accordingly

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Use Code  Blocks  It has everything you need and a very clean GUI

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Netbeans has great C and C   support  Some people complain that it s bloated and slow  but I ve been using it almost exclusively for personal projects and love it  The code assistance feature is one of the best I ve seen

[c] What is the best IDE for C Development / Why use Emacs over an IDE?

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