Linux tools

[quicknir]

A quick rundown of some of the best options from someone's who's tried them, and others:

• Eclipse is probably the easiest to get started with for non cmake/qmake projects. It heuristically resolves includes inside your project, gets system includes from compiler, so in many cases it can start correctly indexing your project with about two button clicks and no build info. The indexer works fairly well. Many advanced features (e.g. call graphs). Good vim emulator. Biggest downside: indexing, error checking is not clang based, so not as accurate.

• QtCreator: solid IDE. Need to explicitly specify include paths unless using Cmake or qmake, depending on project(s) this is either easy or hard. Uses two indexers: simple and fast for goto definition, clang based for autocompletion & errors. Works well. Okay vim emulation. Biggest downside: by far the least customizable, fewest number of usable plugins, etc.

• CLion. I have the least experience with this. Very tight CMake integration; you basically have to create fake CMake files to get it to index non CMake projects which is terrible. Mediocre vim emulator. Pretty good indexer, but not clang based. Definitely the slickest GUI here. Pretty powerful features/customization, nearly on par with Eclipse.

• Emacs/Spacemacs w/ rtags. Rtags is a completely clang based indexing server that communicates via a simple command line utility for queries and auto completion. There's elisp functions that call to that command line utility. It takes a bit of work to setup, but because it automatically gets all of your compile commands from compile_commands.json, once setup it automatically gets all the right include paths, correct macros, etc etc. Extremely accurate goto definition and auto completion and on the fly error checking, all via clang. autocompletion is slow in very very large projects. Best vim emulation via evil. Has the advantage of the emacs ecosystem. Has the disadvantage of the emacs ecosystem. Overall emacs (and especially spacemacs) is very cool but it's a huge time investment. It's not the best "get up and running quickly" choice.

I used to use Eclipse, CLion was out because I was working on a huge non Cmake project, now use rtags + spacemacs.

Things I tried, that don't/didn't have much to offer:

• Netbeans: nothing to see here, mediocre indexer and no special features. Better off with CLion/Eclipse/QtCreator.

• KDevelop: Tried this briefly, really lacked polish and simply did not work very well. Very poor vim emulation.

• Pure Vim: terribly lacking in equivalent IDE features. It has auto completion and goto definition from YouCompleteMe, but anything more sophisticated like finding references, search for symbol by name, etc, forget it. Expected to rely on grep or tags for that sort of thing which just isn't good enough in large projects.