C IDE for Linux

Question

I want to expand my programming horizons to Linux  A good  dependable basic toolset is important  and what is more basic than an IDE   I could find these SO topics    Lightweight IDE for linux and What tools do you use to develop C   applications on Linux    I m not looking for a lightweight IDE  If an IDE is worth the money  then I will pay for it  so it need not be free   My question  then      What good  C   programming IDE is available for Linux    The minimums are fairly standard  syntax highlighting  code completion  like intellisense or its Eclipse counterpart  and integrated debugging  e g   basic breakpoints    I have searched for it myself  but there are so many that it is almost impossible to separate the good from the bads by hand  especially for someone like me who has little  C   coding experience in Linux  I know that Eclipse supports C    and I really like that IDE for Java  but is it any good for C   and is there something better   The second post actually has some good suggestions  but what I am missing is what exactly makes the sugested IDE so good for the user  what are its  dis advantages   Maybe my question should therefore be      What IDE do you propose  given your experiences   and why

User · Answer

I love how people completely miss the request in the original question for an IDE. Linux is NOT an IDE. That's just not what those words mean. I learned c and c++ using vi and gcc and make, and I'm not saying they aren't adequate tools, but they are NOT an IDE. Even if you use more elaborate tools like vim or emacs or whatever fancy editor you want, typing commands on a command line is not an IDE.

Also, you all know make exists as part of visual studio right? The idea that an IDE is "limiting" is just silly if you can use the IDE to speed some things, yet are still able to fall back on command line stuff when needed.

All that said, I'd suggest, as several above have, trying Code blocks. Its got decent code highlighting, a pretty effortless way to create a project, code it, run it, etc, that is the core of a real IDE, and seems fairly stable. Debugging sucks...I have never seen a decent interactive debugger in any linux/unix variant. gdb ain't it. If you're used to visual studio style debugging, you're pretty much out of luck.

Anyway, I'll go pack my things, I know the one-view-only linux crowd will shout this down and run me out of town in no time.

User · Answer

make   vim   gdb   one great IDE

User · Answer

Although I use Vim  some of my co-workers use SlickEdit which looks pretty good  I m not certain about integrated debugging because we wouldn t be able to do that on our particular project anyway   SlickEdit does have good support for navigating large code bases  with cross referencing and tag jumping  Of course it has the basic stuff like syntax highlighting and code completion too

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I really suggest codeblocks  It s not as heavy as Eclipse and it s got Visual Studio project support

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SlickEdit   I have used and loved SlickEdit since 2005  both on Windows and on Linux   I also have experience working in Visual Studio  5  6  2003  2005  and just with Emacs and command line   I use SlickEdit with external makefiles  some of my teammates use SlickEdit  others use Emacs vi   I do not use the integrated debugger  integrated version control  integrated build system  I generally find too much integration to be real pain   SlickEdit is robust  very few bugs   fast and intuitive   It is like a German car  a driver s car     The newest versions of SlickEdit seem to offer many features that do not interest me  I am a little worried that the product will become bloated and diluted in the future   For now  I use V13 0  it is great

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If you were using vim for a long time  then you should actually make that as your IDE  There are a lot of addons available  I found several of those as pretty useful  and compiled it here  have a look at it    C C   IDE Source code browser   And a lot more in the vi   vim tips  amp  tricks series over there

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Having been raised on Visual Studio  I ve found the relatively young Code  Blocks to be very familiar

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I m glad you seem to be working it out with vim  But I have to say  I m a bit mystified about how you already  really like Eclipse for Java   implying that you re already familiar with how it works  In that case  why wouldn t you also use it for C    CDT meets every requirement you ve mentioned

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IntelliJ IDEA   the C C   plugin at http   plugins intellij net plugin  id 1373  Prepare to have your mind-blown   Cheers

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Initially  confusion  When originally writing this answer  I had recently made the switch from Visual Studio  with years of experience  to Linux and the first thing I did was try to find a reasonable IDE  At the time this was impossible  no good IDE existed   Epiphany  UNIX is an IDE  All of it 1  And then I realised that the IDE in Linux is the command line with its tools    First you set up your shell   Bash  in my case  but many people prefer fish or  Oh My  Zsh   and your editor  pick your poison     both are state of the art    Neovim2 or Emacs     Depending on your needs  you will then have to install and configure several plugins to make the editor work nicely  that   s the one annoying part   For example  most programmers on Vim will benefit from the YouCompleteMe plugin for smart autocompletion   Once that   s done  the shell is your command interface to interact with the various tools     Debuggers  gdb   Profilers  gprof  valgrind   etc  You set up your project build environment using Make  CMake  SnakeMake or any of the various alternatives  And you manage your code with a version control system  most people use Git   You also use tmux  previously also screen  to multiplex    think multiple windows tabs panels  and persist your terminal session   The point is that  thanks to the shell and a few tool writing conventions  these all integrate with each other  And that way the Linux shell is a truly integrated development environment  completely on par with other modern IDEs   This doesn   t mean that individual IDEs don   t have features that the command line may be lacking  but the inverse is also true    To each their own  I cannot overstate how well the above workflow functions once you   ve gotten into the habit  But some people simply prefer graphical editors  and in the years since this answer was originally written  Linux has gained a suite of excellent graphical IDEs for several different programming languages  but not  as far as I   m aware  for C     Do give them a try even if       like me       you end up not using them  Here   s just a small and biased selection    For Python development  there   s PyCharm For R  there   s RStudio For JavaScript and TypeScript  there   s Visual Studio Code  which is also a good all-round editor  And finally  many people love the Sublime Text editor for general code editing    Keep in mind that this list is far from complete     1 I stole that title from dsm   s comment   2 I used to refer to Vim here  And while plain Vim is still more than capable  Neovim is a promising restart  and it   s modernised a few old warts

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For me Ultimate   seems to be the best solution to write cross-os program

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Just a quick follow up for this question     It s been a month since I started using Vim as my main  GUI  tool for programming C   in Linux  At first the learning curve was indeed a bit steep but after a while and with the right options turned on and scripts running I really got the hang of it   I love the way how you can shape Vim to suite your needs  just add change key mappings and Vim is turned into a highly productive  IDE    The toolchain to build and compile a C   program on Linux is also really intuitive  make and g   are the tools you ll use   The debugger ddd is however not really that good  but maybe that s because I haven t had the time to master it properly   So to anyone who is  or was looking for a good C   IDE in Linux  just like I was  your best bet lays with the standard available tools in Linux itself  Vim  g    ddd  and you should really at least try to use them  before looking for sonething else     Last but not least  I really want to thank konrad for his answer here  It really helped me find my way in the Linux development environment  thank you   I m also not closing this question  so people can still react or maybe even add new suggestions or additions to the already really nice answers

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Code  Blocks is Great

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In my eyes best IDE for Linux is SlickEdit  It cost some money but it is fast  great support for tagging and great diff tool  works well with huge project

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Konrad s advice is excellent  and you should become happily productive in a classic vi cc ld db make environment without too much trouble  Many  many university students have learned this toolchain over the course of a 10-15 week class   That said  the other classic environment is to go the Emacs route  I wouldn t call it an IDE  but it does integrate two important development tools into the editor  the compiler s output  and the debugger  You can have it zip you to the line in the file corresponding to a compiler error  and you can set breakpoints and use the stepper from the editor

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I quite like Ultimate   s IDE  It has some features that were designed to use with their own library  which  BTW  is quite a nice toolkit if you don t want to buy on either GTK  or QT  but it works perfectly well with general C   projects  It provides decent code completion  good syntax colouring  integrated debugging  and all other features most modern IDEs support

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Also you can try to setup emacs as an IDE    Details are discussed here

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geany I recommend

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I ve previously used Ultimate   IDE and it s rather good

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I like SciTE as a basic editor for C   Python on Linux  It has keyboard bindings similar to VC so you do not have to reprogram your cut-and-paste fingers   I use it together with Git for source code control and the very useful  git grep  command for searching in your code base   I played with Eclipse CDT but my source codebase was to big for it and I spend too much time waiting on the IDE  If your project is smaller it may be good for you though

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vim editor   g   compiler GNU C      gdb - might help you

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Checkout Netbeans  it s written in Java so you ll have the same environment regardless of your OS  and it supports a lot more than just C     I m not going to try to convince you  because I think IDEs can be a very personal choice  For me it improves my productivity by being fast  supporting the languages I code in and has the standard features you d expect from an IDE

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For CMake based projects i use Jetbrains CLion  For Autotools based projects the already mentioned Qtcreator   For everything else  VIM   YouCompleteMe

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If you like Eclipse for Java  I suggest Eclipse CDT   Despite C C   support isn t so powerful as is for Java  it still offers most of the features  It has a nice feature named Managed Project that makes working with C C   projects easier if you don t have experience with Makefiles  But you can still use Makefiles  I do C and Java coding and I m really happy with CDT  I m developing the firmware for a embedded device in C and a application in Java that talks to this device  and is really nice to  use the same environment for both  I guess it probably makes me more productive

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Perhaps the Linux Tools Project for Eclipse could fill your needs      The Linux Tools project aims to bring a full-featured C and C   IDE to Linux developers  We build on the source editing and debugging features of the CDT and integrate popular native development tools such as the GNU Autotools  Valgrind  OProfile  RPM  SystemTap  GCov  GProf  LTTng  etc  Current projects include LTTng trace viewers and analyzers  an RPM  spec editor  Autotools build integration  a Valgrind heap usage analysis tool  and OProfile call profiling tools

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acme  sam from plan9    you can use it through Plan 9 from User Space

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Not to repeat an answer  but I think I can add a bit more   Slickedit is an excellent IDE   It supports large code-bases well without slowing down or spending all its time indexing   This is a problem I had with eclipse s cdt    Slickedit s speed is probably the nicest thing about it  actually  The code completion works well and there are a large amount of options for things like automatic formatting  beautification and refactoring  It does have integrated debugging  It has plug-in support and fairly active community creating them  In theory  you should be able to integrate well with people doing the traditional makefile stuff  as it allows you to create a project directly from one  but that didn t work as smoothly as I would have liked when I tried it  In addition to Linux  there are Mac and Windows versions of it  should you need them

User · Answer

As an old-time UNIX guy  I always use Emacs   But that has a pretty steep and long learning curve  so I m not sure I can recommend it to newcomers   There really isn t a  good  IDE for Linux   Eclipse is not very good for C C    CDT is improving  but is not very useful yet    The others are missing all the features you are going to be looking for   It really is important to learn how all the individual tools  gcc  make  gdb  etc   work   After you do so  you may find the Visual Studio way of doing things to be very limiting

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On Linux there are plenty of IDEs     Code  blocks Codelite KDevelop Qt Creator Eclipse with CDT NetBeans   In my experience  the most valuable are Eclipse and Qt Creator  Both provide all  standard  features  i e   autocompletion  syntax highlightning  debugger  git integration   It is worth noting that Eclipse also provides refactoring functionalities  while Qt Creator provides integration with Valgrind and support for deployment on remote targets   Also the commercial CLion IDE seems preety good  but I ve not used it extensively

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Sun Studio version 12 is a free download FREE and paid support available  -- http   developers sun com sunstudio downloads thankyou jsp submit  A0FREE Download A0 BB A0   I m sure you have code completion and debugging support including plugin support in this IDE   Sun Studio is available for Linux as well as Solaris   forums   http   developers sun com sunstudio community forums index jsp   Sun Studio Linux forums   http   forum sun com forum jspa forumID 855  I ll be eager to hear your feedback on this tool   BR   A

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I use Eclipse CDT and Qt Creator  for Qt applications    That s my preferences  It s a very suggestive question and there is as many answers as there is developers

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Code  Blocks  Eclipse CDT   Soon you ll find that IDEs are not enough  and you ll have to learn the GCC toolchain anyway  which isn t hard  at least learning the basic functionality   But no harm in reducing the transitional pain with the IDEs  IMO

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A quick answer  just to add a little more knowledge to this topic  You must definitely check out NetBeans  Netbeans 6 7 has the following features      C C   Projects and Templates  Supports syntax highlighting  automatic code completion  automatic indentation  It has a C C   Debugger Supports Compiler Configurations  Configuration Manager and Makefile Support  with a Wizard   It has a Classes Window  a Usages Window and a File Navigation Window  or panel   A Macro expansion view  and also tooltips  Support for QT development    I think it s a perfect  and far better  Visual Studio substitution  and a very good tool to learn C C     Good Luck

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My personal favorite is the CodeLite 2 x IDE   see  http   www codelite org  The decision to use CodeLite was based on a research regarding the following C   IDE for Linux    Eclipse Galileo with CDT Plugin NetBeans 6 7  which is also the base for the SunStudio IDE  KDevelop4 CodeBlocks 8 02 CodeLite 2 x   After all I have decided to use CodeLite 2 x   Below I have listed some Pros and Cons regarding the mentioned C   IDEs  Please note  that this reflects my personal opinion only   EDIT  what a pity that SOF doesn t support tables  so I have to write in paragraphs      Eclipse Galileo with CDT Plugin  Pros    reasonable fast also supports Java  Perl with E P I C plugin  commonly used and well maintained also available for other OS flavours  Windows  MacOS  Solaris  AIX       Cons    GUI is very confusing and somewhat inconsistent - not very intuitive at all heavy weight Only supports CVS  AFAIK    NetBeans 6 7  note this is also the base for the SunStudio IDE   Pros    one of the most intuitive GUI I have ever seen also supports Java  Python  Ruby integrates CVS  SVN  Mercurial commonly used and well maintained also available for other OS flavours  Windows  MacOS  Solaris    Cons    extremly slow heavy weight uses Spaces for indentation  which is not the policy at my work  I m sure this is configurable  but I couldn t find out how to to that   KDevelop4  note  I did not much testing on it   Pros    commonly used on Linux integrates CVS  SVN  Mercurial   Cons    the GUI looks somewhat old fashioned heavy weight very specific to the KDE environment   CodeBlocks 8 02  note  I did not much testing on it   Pros    reasonable fast   Cons    the GUI looks somewhat old fashioned  although it has a nice startup screen  the fonts in the editor are very small some icons  e g  the debugger related icons starting stepping  are very small no source control integration   CodeLite 2 x  note  this is my personal favorite   Pros    the best  modern looking and intuitive GUI I have seen on Linux lightweight reasonable fast integrates SVN also available on other OS flavours Windows  MacOS  Solaris       Cons    no CVS integration  that s important for me because I have to use it at work  no support for Java  Perl  Python  would be nice to have

User · Answer

I recommend you read The Art Of UNIX Progranmming  It will frame your mind into using the environment as your IDE

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Use Mono-Develop  It is very similar to Visual Studio  It works cross-platform and is Awesome

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why wouldn t you also use it for C      CDT meets every requirement you ve   mentioned    I didn t use eclipse at first because I wasn t sure that it was equally good at giving me the means of developing in C    efficiently   Besides that  I was also convinced that there had to be better  more specialized tools available for c   development in Linux       and I really like that  eclipse  IDE for java    but is it any good for c   and won t I   miss out on something that is even   better    I honestly believe that  although some tools  like eclipse  are great at many things  it is best to look for other options as well  and I don t mean that for IDE s only  but in general and even in real life     Like in this case  vim is really great  and I would have missed out on it if I sticked to something I already knew

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And then I noticed that this simply isn t how you work there   and I threw everything out  spent a few days reading manuals  set up my shell  bash   set up a GVIM environment  learned the GCC binutils toolchain  make and gdb and lived happily ever after    I d mostly agree  but the problem is also one of perception  we forget how difficult it was to become productive in any chose IDE  or other environment    I find IDE s  Visual Studio  NetBeans  Eclipse  amazingly cumbersome in so many ways      As an old-time UNIX guy  I always use Emacs  But that has a pretty steep    and long learning curve  so I m not sure I can recommend it to newcomers    I d second that  use Emacs as my primary editor on both Linux and on MSW  XP2 W2K   I would disagree that it has a steep learning curve  but would say that because of the huge number of features it has a long learning curve   You can be productive within a short time  but if you want you can learn new features of it for years to come   However -- don t expect all the features of Emacs to be available on drop-down menus  there is just too much functionality to find it there   As I metioned  I ve used GNU Emacs on MSW for years   And it s always worked well with Visual Studio until I  upgraded  to 2008  now it sometimes delays many seconds before refreshing files from disk    The main reason for editing in the VS window is the  Intellisense  code completion feature

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I hear Anjuta is pretty slick for Gnome users  I played a bit with KDevelop and it s nice  but sort of lacking featurewise  Code  Blocks is also very promising  and I like that one best

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I prefer using Emacs and Vim for writing C   code  When I need to use an IDE  I use CodeBlocks

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I have been using Anjuta for my university projects about 3 years ago  I haven t been using it lately  But it was nice back then  so should be better with the latest releases

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I am using  Geany  found good so far  its fast and light weight IDE    Among Geany   s features are      Code folding   Session saving   Basic IDE features such as syntax highlighting  tabs  automatic indentation and code completion   Simple project management    Build system   Color picker  surprisingly handy during web development    Embedded terminal emulation   Call tips   Symbol lists   Auto-completion of common constructs  such as if  else  while  etc

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At least for Qt specific projects  the Qt Creator  from Nokia Trolltech Digia  shows great promise

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could you clarify a little bit more how it was for you  what you had to change  Maybe you could point me in the right direction by providing some links to the information you used    My first source were actually the tools  man pages  Just type    man toolname   on the command line    here is part of the prompt  not the input    Depending on the platform  they re quite well-written and can also be found on the internet  In the case of make  I actually read the complete documentation which took a few hours  Actually  I don t think this is necessary or helpful in most cases but I had a few special requirements in my first assignments under Linux that required a sophisticated makefile  After writing the makefile I gave it to an experienced colleague who did some minor tweaks and corrections  After that  I pretty much knew make   I used GVIM because I had some  but not much  prior experience there  I can t say anything at all about Emacs or alternatives  I find it really helps to read other peoples   gvimrc config file  Many people put it on the web  Here s mine   Don t try to master all binutils at once  there are too many functions  But get a general overview so you ll know where to search when needing something in the future  You should  however  know all the important parameters for g   and ld  the GCC linker tool that s invoked automatically except when explicitly prevented       Also I m curious  do you have code completion and syntax highlighting when you code    Syntax highlighting  yes  and a much better one than Visual Studio  Code completion  yes-ish  First  I have to admit that I didn t use C   code completion even in Visual Studio because  compared to VB and C   it wasn t good enough  I don t use it often now but nevertheless  GVIM has native code completion support for C    Combined with the ctags library and a plug-in like taglist this is almost an IDE   Actually  what got me started was an article by Armin Ronacher  Before reading the text  look at the screenshots at the end of it      do you have to compile first before getting  syntax  errors    Yes  But this is the same for Visual Studio  isn t it  I ve never used Whole Tomato   Of course  the syntax highlighting will show you non-matching brackets but that s about all      and how do you debug  again think breakpoints etc     I use gdb which is a command-line tool  There s also a graphical frontend called DDD  gdb is a modern debugging tool and can do everything you can do in an IDE  The only thing that really annoys me is reading a stack trace because lines aren t indented or formatted so it s really hard to scan the information when you re using a lot of templates  which I do   But those also clutter the stack trace in IDEs      Like I said  I had the  pleasure  to set my first steps in the Java programming language using windows notepad and the command line java compiler in high school  and it was     wel a nightmare  certainly when I could compare it with other programming courses I had back then where we had decent IDE s   You shouldn t even try to compare a modern  full-feature editor like Emacs or GVIM to Notepad  Notepad is an embellished TextBox control  and this really makes all the difference  Additionally  working on the command line is a very different experience in Linux and Windows  The Windows cmd exe is severely crippled  PowerShell is much better    EDIT  I should mention explicitly that GVIM has tabbed editing  as in tabbed browsing  not tabs-vs-spaces   It took me ages to find them although they re not hidden at all  Just type  tabe instead of plain  e when opening a file or creating a new one  and GVIM will create a new tab  Switching between tabs can be done using the cursor or several different shortcuts  depending on the platform   The key gt  type g  then t in command mode  should work everywhere  and jumps to the next tab  or tab no  n if a number was given  Type  help gt to get more help

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Shorter answer is  choosing whatever  editor  you like  then use GDB console or a simple GDB front end to debug your application  The debuggers come with fancy IDEs such as Netbeans sucks for C C     I use Netbeans as my editor  and Insight and GDB console as my debugger   With insight  you have a nice GUI and the raw power of GDB   As soon as you get used to GDB commands  you will start to love it since you can do things you will never be able to do using an GUI  You can use even use Python as your script language if you are using GDB 7 or newer version    Most people here paid more attentions to the  Editors  of the IDEs  However  if you are developing a large project in C C    you could easily spend more than 70  of your time on the  debuggers   The debuggers of the fancy IDEs are at least 10 years behind Visual Studio  For instance  Netbenas has very similar interfaces with Visual Studio  But its debugger has a number of disadvantages compared to Visual Studio    Very slow to display even a array with only a few hundreds of elements No highlighting for changed value   By default  visual studio shows changed values in the watch windows in red  Very limited ability to show memory   You cannot modify the source code then continue to run  If a bug takes a long time to hit  you would like to change the source and apply the changes live and continue to run your application  You cannot change the  next statement  to run  In Visual Studio  you can use  Set Next Statement  to change how your application runs  Although this feature could crash your application if not used properly  but it will save you a lot of time  For instance  if you found the state of your application is not correct  but you do not know what caused the problems  you might want to rerun a certain region of the your source codes without restarting your application  No built-in support for STL such as vector  list  deque and map etc  No watch points  You need to have this feature  when you need to stop your application right at the point a variable is changed  Intel based computers have hardware watch points so that the watch points will not slow down your system  It might takes many hours to find some hard-to-find bugs without using watch points    Visual Studio  calls  watch pointer  as  Data BreakPoint      The list can be a lot longer   I was so frustrated by the disadvantages of the Netbeans or other similar IDEs  so that I started to learn GDB itself  I found GDB itself are very powerful  GDB does not have all the  disadvantages  mentioned above  Actually  GDB is very powerful  it is even better than Visual Studio in many ways  Here I just show you a very simple example   For instance  you have a array like   struct IdAndValue     int ID    int value       IdAndValue IdAndValues 1000     When your application stops  and you want to examine the data in IdAndValues  For instance  if you want to find the ordinals and values in the array for a particular  ID   you can create a script like the following   define PrintVal  set  i 0 printf  ID    d n    arg0 while  i lt 1000   if IdAndValues  i  ID     arg0     printf  ordinal    d  value    d n    i  IdAndValues  i  vaue     set  i     end end end   You can use all variables in your application in the current context   your own variables  in our example  it is  i   arguments passed  in our example  it is  arg0  and all GDB commands  built-in or user defined    Use PrintVal 1 from GDB prompt to print out values for ID  1   By the way  NetBeans does come with a GDB console  but by using the console  you could crash Netbeans  And I believe that is why the console is hidden by default in NetBeans

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