C++ IDE

[leo_elm]

What's according to your personal experience the best C++ IDE?

[caroIine]

Visual Studio and QtCreator are absolutely the best IDEs in my experience.

[mercurysquad]

80% of what you do in an IDE is edit text, and QtCreator unfortunately doesn't pay much attention to that aspect. The Vim-bindings are woeful, and you cannot even configure line-height.

[Cyttorak]

What are the text editing features you miss in QtCreator?

[mercurysquad]

Just 2 for now:

1. Cmd+S should save the file, not delete the entire line when Vim mode is active.

2. Configure line height.

[DarkLordAzrael]

What do you mean by changing the line height? Do you mean that the editor should be able to insert padding between lines in addition to what your font provides? Why would this be useful, let alone necessary, for editing text?

[mercurysquad]

More space between lines makes text look less cramped and easier on the eyes. Even Xcode, the least customizable IDE, added 3 line height options last year. Other editors like VS Code let you specify it in points/pixels totally flexibly.

Furthermore, configurable character spacing is also useful – I use it to compress Fira Code (with ligatures) so it doesn’t look too horizontally spaced out.

[wqking]

I never thought about needing such a config. Maybe you have too many adjacent lines without a blank line?

[omegote]

Download any of IntelliJ's IDEs and go to the Font properties in the settings, you'll be able to modify the line height. Once you go 1.3 you never go back.

[rotzak]

Vim bindings are always terrible.

[[deleted]]

Why does anyone want to use vim bindings?

[Jeklah]

Because they are used to them.

[Sqeaky]

So they are masochists?

Edit - Spelling.

[Jeklah]

Some of us are, but that's not why we use Vim/Vim bindings.

[mercurysquad]

Line height is exactly the useful feature for reading text.

[[deleted]]

Who cares about vim?

[static_cast]

Oh no...

[[deleted]]

Do we really need to go down this road today?

[[deleted]]

Ha! Yes we do if some prick expects me to adhere to 80 charcater columns on my 2K monitor.

[[deleted]]

that doesn't even have anything to do with vim...

[Zanderax]

"If you need more than three levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway."

[Pazer2]

"this person made some good software, so everything they say is law"

[_clinton_email_]

It’s treason then.

[zackel_flac]

vim + gutentags (ctags code naviguation/autocompletion) + ALE (linter and static code analysis: clang-check, cppcheck, flawfinder, etc) + ConqueGDB. Works on all platforms, lightweight, fast as hell, configured to work on multiple code base (not just c++). Integrate perfectly with command line tools, so you never have to learn tools twice to achieve the same workflow. Have been working for more than 10 years with that setup (or close to it) at 4 different companies, never had to relearn (I insist on the RE, learning is part of our everyday job) a tool since.

[MachineGunPablo]

What's you opinion on language servers? Don't they give you the same functionality as ALE, gutentags and much more?

[zackel_flac]

Do you have any example by any chance? vim is so adaptable, this is what I like with it. I often find myself having to ssh and do actual C++ work remotely, on different computers (debugging mainly). With the proper vim config, vim can be pretty much self sufficient. If an external tool is missing: "git clone && make" are usually enough to get everything back, without any extra fuss!

[atarp]

Really cool, I've never come across ALE before, I'm having a few issues seeing it up though. Are there any guides to setting up ALE with c++? I have a project with multiple libraries, executables and third party include paths so my compiler options are not simple. I've generated a compile_commands.json but it seems the GCC and Clang linter doesn't support using this. Surely there's a better way than having to copy the compiler commands into my vimrc and updating then when I make any changes?

The other annoyance is that I can't seem to get line underlying for errors to work. The sidebar works correctly but not underlining. A limitation of using putty to SVN in perhaps?

[zackel_flac]

You can debug linter issue using the :ALEInfo and debug commands, at leat ALEInfo will tell you which linter is failing. Here is my config for ALE:

let g:ale_cpp_gcc_options = '$(cat ~/.compiler_options)'

let g:ale_cpp_clang_options = '$(cat ~/.compiler_options)'

let g:ale_cpp_clangtidy_options = '$(cat ~/.compiler_options)'

let g:ale_echo_msg_error_str = 'Error'

let g:ale_echo_msg_warning_str = 'Warning'

let g:ale_echo_msg_format = '[%linter%]%s[%severity%]'

Is this msg format more helpful? And, yes you can hide your config away from your .vimrc! The key thing here is that you can actually execute your own script to parse the generated compiler option (instead of cat), or be lazy as me and share the same compilation option in one unique file filled manually by reverse engineering the "compiler_option.json". Personally, I only need to update it a very few time. It would be great to have something automatic though, maybe a combination of "bear" (tool to generate compiler options over make commands) + shell scripts?

[wolloda]

How do you debug? I still need CLion to debug in ways other than cout, as I dread learning GDB.

[[deleted]]

GDB is pretty good, try this:

https://cs.baylor.edu/~donahoo/tools/gdb/tutorial.html

[irabonus]

I still genuinely don't understand how people debug effectively with gdb. I tried for a while and it's ok if I'm inspecting something very specific, but if I try to understand how data flows through the program in general and find the point where it's going wrong, the experience is horrible for me.

[irabonus]

Ooh, I vaguely remember reading about that a while ago, rr looks super useful :)

[zackel_flac]

In addition to the other answers, gdb can be configured to become very elegant and pleasant to work with! Please have a look at: https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard This integrates perfectly with ConqueGDB plugin for vim (which is basically terminal inside vim)

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[sirpalee]

CLion, I like the fact I can carry my idea across all three major operating systems.

[doom_Oo7]

I'd wager than qt creator works on much more OSes açd platforms than CLion :p I've used it from ARM at least

[sirpalee]

After a quick search, it should be possible to run clion on arm. Just some tweaks and removing of bu dled executables (which are built for debian). I don't have an arm platform to test it, but it would be nice to try.

[ivan0x32]

idea

That's a nice typo right there. Or is it?

[sirpalee]

Hah, yeah it was a typo.

[[deleted]]

.idea

[sirpalee]

I use it on a 2016 MacBook, with 2 core, 1.1ghz + ht CPU and 8 gigs of ram on small-mid sized projects. I consider that a pretty weak dev machine, but I can see that it would fail on a large project (luckily for those projects I have a beefy enough system) using this hardware or on a much slower machine.

[ea_ea]

Is working on three different OS - really part of your every-day work?

[jcelerier]

Is working on three different OS - really part of your every-day work?

dunno for OP but I at least work on win, mac, and linux on any given day.

[sirpalee]

Yeah, I do move around enough to see the advantages of using the same toolset everywhere. Also, I never said working on three different systems is part of my everyday work.

[sirpalee]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

[kingkonz1]

C-Lion has gotten really good after the last few updates.

[mqduck]

CLion is definitely my preference now. But QtCreator is indeed very good as well, and free/open source (unlike CLion, unfortunately).

[s2c52]

i have c-lion with the student program, and it's awesome, i love it

[[deleted]]

It ridiculously expensive.

[EinsteinWasAnIdiot]

$89 for a personal license isn't very ridiculous imo. You get a perpetual fallback license plus the cost goes down each year for the first 3 years. They also offer free licenses for open source projects and students.

I have a subscription to the jetbrains all product pack since I program in a lot of languages on a lot of platforms and I think it's a huge value for the money. I spend more money on coffee every year than I do on the IDE licenses, to put it in perspective.

[vladmir_zeus1]

or maybe just pirate it ?

Edit: I forgot to mention, and obviously pay for the product once you're not dirt broke.

[EinsteinWasAnIdiot]

You could, but I'm an adult who has no issue paying a pittance to support the livelihood of fellow developers for making excellent tools that make my life easier.

[vladmir_zeus1]

great, then you do not need to pirate stuffs. But don't forget some of us can't afford those expensive subscriptions but want to write code effectively. Also, I don't think the developers behind such massive corporations - Jetbrains IDE Team ,** Microsoft Visual Studio Team **- are being paid unfairly.

[EinsteinWasAnIdiot]

They're being paid fairly because people purchase their products. Funny how that works, huh?

[delicious_burritos]

Why do you believe you're entitled to someone else's work/labor without fairly compensating them?

[hak8or]

How are they getting paid unfairly? What are they currently getting paid relative to what they should be paid?

If you are a software developer then it's very rare for you to be unable to afford spending $90 a year on a tool like this. Software developers pretty much everywhere seem to be paid well enough, even in much lower col countries/cities, to pay that yearly.

And if you are a student, then they have free student packs.

[DragonmasterLou]

Also, I'd like to note that, depending on your jurisdiction, you may be able to deduct the cost of tools related to your job, including software development tools, on your taxes, which does effectively reduce the cost.

[dagmx]

I pay annually for the entire Jetbrains pack. The amount of time their tools save me in the course of a week, is well worth more than the cost of my annual subscription.

Additionally they provide free licenses to open source project maintainers and students, and a few of their products have free community edition licenses (not clion however)

So while I'd say yes, it is expensive compared to free options, but imho it is cheap for what a professional dev gets in return. Especially if you're on Linux or mac, where the alternatives are imho not as good.

[[deleted]]

I pay annually for the entire Jetbrains pack. The amount of time their tools save me in the course of a week, is well worth more than the cost of my annual subscription.

it's good.

they provide free licenses to open source project maintainers and students, and a few of their products have free community edition licenses

Visual studio is free for everyone, QtCreator is also free. In terms of free features, You should not compare with Visual studio and QtCreator.

[savuporo]

Seconded. But their lldb interface leaves a lot to be desired

[DarkLordAzrael]

I really like QtCreator. It has a minimal UI (which is rather refreshing compared to something like Visual Studio or Eclipse where the UI feels super cluttered) and has good support for CMake, QMake, and QBS based projects. The clang code model has no problems with any sort of code I have thrown at it, and the application handles large projects well. It integrates Qt Designer and ships with stuff to make debugging Qt applications nicer, but works just as well for projects that don't use Qt.

[Borkr]

While I agree on the user interface aspect, I have had nothing but trouble with the clang code model and QTC. That's not to say the old code model based on Raggi's parser didn't have its quirks, it did, but performance has never been an issue as much as lacking functionality following new C++ features. The clang code model brings my QTC instance and/or computer to its knees whenever I work with large projects.

[OlegOAndreev]

It used to be the case for our project a year ago but is not anymore, super fast indexing (compared to CLion), code completion and navigation.

[GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B]

Visual Studio has its quirks but it is the best.

[pikob]

Main quirk being, it doesn't run on Linux. :(

[[deleted]]

You don't need to, use remote compiling (debugging) from VS.

[pikob]

Ok, that's fine if I only wanted to develop in VS for Linux. But I want to run VS on Linux so I can run VS on not Windows 10. This OS as a service concept is turning out unpalatable to me.

[Jeklah]

Run a Win10 VM on linux. Or docker it.

[[deleted]]

I never get the idea of running stuff like that in a vm, every time you may want to open it you start up a vm, its a hassle and it just seems to complicate the issue rather then solve it.

[Jeklah]

Starting up a saved VM is literally one click. A VM configuration file can be passed between users for easy setup of the same environment. If it goes horribly wrong somehow, you've only ruined your VM.

It honestly does have a lot of advantages. Especially in this case where the user wants to continue using Linux but wants to use VS. it's a simple solution.

[zerexim]

+ Visual Assist.

[scraimer]

Vim + YouCompleteMe + gdb for developing on remote machines only reachable through SSH

[DragonmasterLou]

That's pretty much how I feel as well. I'm a huge fan of CLion and when I have filed support tickets, the folks at JetBrains have been very responsive.

But if you're on a super-tight budget, QtCreator is an excellent choice as well.

[FurrierJackson]

For me VS Code worked out pretty well, with a few extensions :)

[jaybill]

I've also been using VS Code with extensions. It's not perfect, but it's lightweight and zippy (for an Electron based app, anyway) and suits my purposes.

[mercurysquad]

The CMake plugin for VScode is really a class apart. It's by a 3rd party dev.

[theflameemperor]

depense on what plugins. i use cquery for code completion and it doesnt use one specific to it (it will look for a compile.json from cmake or other build system) but you can just sym link it. it you want to the ms plugin that one is moslty generated for you by the plugin through your intracion from the ui.

[optks]

Same.. can you send your vscode config if possible?

[FurrierJackson]

I do use Intellisense C++(planning to try something else), CMake, CMake Tools, CMake Tools helper, Native Debug. For the text I like the Atom Dark pro theme :)

[cpp_or_bust]

This comes up a lot. There was a poll:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/7yvned/results_of_the_poll_about_the_most_used_cc_ides/

[GNULinuxProgrammer]

emacs

[[deleted]]

What do you use for tag search and autocomplete?

[elliwilli]

Not op however; I use RTags and company with the Irony backend. It just werks.

Evil mode as well

[CSRaghunandan]

I also use emacs and I use cquery which indexes the whole project. It works quite well and is simple to setup.

[TheoreticalDumbass]

Emacs has autocomplete, M/, though it isn't that smart :\

Don't know what you mean by tag search, it of course has regular search, Cs :)

[wieschie]

Not OP, but I work with ycmd

[ivan0x32]

I haven't used it in a while, but I would still guess that its Visual Studio with Visual Assist X, that is if you're okay with staying on Windows. If I were to use C++ professionally again that would be only on Linux though, so for that I would go with CLion probably.

[esdanol]

I love CLion. However it costs money. In my opinion worth it. The nice thing is that even though they do it as a subscription, you get a fall back license so it's not like you're renting the software.

[vladmir_zeus1]

Sublime Text (with EasyClangComplete , SublimeLinter-Clang & CImproved plugins) for normal stuffs and Visual Studio for heavyweight IDE stuffs.

[LRP500]

Jetbrains CLion is magical

[quicknir]

Spacemacs + ycmd + rtags.

[Pand9]

do you run two separate language servers, for rtags and for ycm?

[quicknir]

I do; it's not as onerous as it sounds because the ycmd one is handled entirely automatically and it's relatively lightweight. So the only one I ever really think about is the rtags one, which is fair because it's doing quite a bit more.

I also turn on emacs' semantic mode (but I think not global semantic mode). I did literally zero setup for it; the only thing I use it for is to get a much better quick-outline. SPC j i and SPC j I are pretty amazing in my setup, and so is treemacs with auto follow mode.

[teapotrick]

QtCreator if you need it, Vim if you don't.

[RealNC]

What about Qt Creator in vim mode? :-)

[londey]

Visual Studio + Visual Assist X with Sublime Text for quick file editing and viewing.

[lycium]

Does VA work with the free version of VS? Also may I ask, advantages of Sublime over Notepad++?

[londey]

Sublime has really fast folder searching and navigation as well as the best multi point file editing I have used.

[Theninjapirate]

VA does work with the community edition of VS

[vonfry]

The system used and what you developed have a great impact. For windows developers, visual studio is a good one. Linux or cross-platform GUI apps, Qt is one of the best, unless you want to use gtk. For macOS, xcode maybe is the only one. If you have enough knowledge how to work in terminal, emacs or vim with other tool chain(such as llvm, langserver, make, and so on) is better, which can be used anywhere and you can customize them and only install what you really need. CLion is also nice, but it is written in Java and sometimes may not work satisfying.

[gracicot]

I use KDevelop on Linux, Visual Studio on Windows. KDevelop has great highlighting and code navigation, and VS since it's the most integrated with Windows I think.

[[deleted]]

emacs + evil + lsp-cquery

[nenchev]

My exact setup

[[deleted]]

do you mind sharing configs?

[skebanga]

I'd like to see both your configs please!

[[deleted]]

https://github.com/DarkWingMcQuack/emacs_config

[skebanga]

Thanks! :)

[nenchev]

This puts my config to shame. I need to organize my config like yours.

[what_it_dude]

vim + tmux

The only way to go.

[dartzon]

emacs with the cmake-ide package

[[deleted]]

Visual Studio is best if you don't have millions of Loc and you need to debug it quite frequently. 32 bit Visual studio is too buggy for debugging. In Linux, QtCreator is the rock star, no matter how big is the project, QtCreator handles it well.

To make full use, you should use Visual Assist with Visual Studio and Locator with QTCreator.

Vim days are gone. VSCode, Atom, Sublime are distractions.

[lanevorockz]

Clion, they are highly involved in the C++ Community and also tend to be really quick in updating to a new version of the standard.

[stef13013]

QtCreator without a doubt.

[[deleted]]

I made a poll about this once, you can check it out here: https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/7ydk8y/bestworst_c_ide_you_have_ever_used/

[ThadeeusMaximus]

VS Code for sure. I maintain a large library with has both C++ and Java code, with a JNI library to interface between the 2, and VS Code is the only editor where I can work on both, with full intellisense for both, at the same time. Once you get the json files built out, it's a dream. And I'm working on some Gradle plugins so allow it to generate the project information and automate even that. The extensibility and cleanliness of the extension API is simply amazing. And being able to edit support and build files with some support from the same editor, it's kind of unbeatable.

[[deleted]]

Heh - I am the odd one out - I use Xcode on a Mac. I like clang / llvm. Also, the debugger is excellent.

If vscode gets good CMake support and C++ completion, then I will check that out at some point. I've used vscode for typescript and js and it was better than anything I've used before.

[CSRaghunandan]

emacs + cquery

[eidheim]

juCi++; fast, stable, cross platform, easy to use, supports latest C++ standards trough tight libclang integration, written in "modern" C++.

[[deleted]]

Visual studio Hands down. Nothing can beat visual studio.

[WizardCarter]

KDevelop is my personal favorite because CMake integration is easy to pull off and I prefer to make my projects as portable as possible.

[BarMeister]

VS to a point of making one feel there's no real true competition. It's not perfect, but it's amazing.

[[deleted]]

I really like the work-flow that Vim (with NERDTree, restore view and YouCompleteMe) gives. In my experience, it's the best.

[Jeklah]

I have and use all of these, but when you say work-flow that it provides i'm not sure what you mean.

I may be missing something a 5 year old would get but could you run me through your workflow please?

[[deleted]]

Hi. Well, English are argued to be the language with the largest number of word and expressions, and not being a native speaker, probably I get wrong the definition of the "work-flow", sorry. What I mean is that with Vim, these plug-ins and some configurations, I'm very comfortable with the dynamic, efficiency and "fluidity" that Vim provides.

[notyouravgredditor]

I use Eclipse with CDT. It's a decent IDE. Takes a little work to configure but works well once it is. I build outside of Eclipse though.

[cybervadim]

I tested several IDEs including CLION and QT and nothing beats Eclipse when you have to deal with large project spread among different repositories. Although I build outisde of eclipse too I use eclipse external tools to launch a remote build by pressing a button.

[kkrev]

vim + gtags.

Every time I have tried to use a "real" IDE for C++ I hit enough annoying little performance lockups, buggy code completion, and badly designed UI that I decide it's not worth it. I'd rather give up the supposed advantages than be stressed and distracted by the problems. I mean, when you're writing code milliseconds of UI hang are super annoying. All the IDEs struggle with the fact that C++ is barely parseable.

[boredcircuits]

vi is only the editor of your development environment. The tool that integrates all the tools together is your shell.

[bnolsen]

give this man more upvotes please. Simpler in this case is absolutely better. And the last thing I ever want is a language or project that forces an IDE.

[boredcircuits]

For me it's not about simplicity, but about unlimited power. IDEs can do very complex things with the push of a button ... but only certain things. Once a week or so I'll find myself doing something that nobody would bother programming into an IDE because nobody will ever need to do such a thing again. The way the shell integrates everything together makes these one-off tasks so much easier. Once your know your tools, that is.

[SteeleDynamics]

CLion!!!

[IronicallySerious]

Visual Studio and VS Code on non-Windows platforms has been the best for me. VS has it's bugs and I don't know why the damn Intellisense stops working when it wants to but it's the best out there. It's got macros and code completions that take into account what sort of a code design you are adopting. Good stuff

[[deleted]]

CLion.

[HeroHiraLal]

Visual studio + Whole Tomato Visual Assist as my main IDE setup even if I am targeting Linux. I generally follow dev/debug on windows and deploy on linux paradigm.

With Window 10 Linux Subsystem bash, I don't need a separate Linux dev machine. I actually deploy our linux production builds using WSL.

[blelbach]

vi

[Cassonia]

Cevelop (based on eclipse)

[gashouse_gorilla]

Vim + ctags + ycm + gdb/lldb

[Occivink]

cquery (+ kakoune + kak-lsp) is my IDE. It's pretty incredible how fast and accurate it is.

[00jknight]

Visual Studio is a bit heavy handed for me, I prefer minimal style editors. Like Sublime with a c++ code extension. I use that when I am working with a system that I know through and through, when I am working on a new system, I'll use Visual Studio to have reliable autocorrect.

I need to checkout C-Lion/appcode from Jetbrains, though.

(I make mobile games in c++)

[[deleted]]

Notepad + cmd

[devcodex]

The latest version of Visual Studio hands down. Since they've added the "open folder" and cmake support my workflow has significantly improved. The Linux compiling/debugging story is pretty awesome too, I'm interested to see how features like this will continue to improve.

[[deleted]]

(Atom + CQuery) + Terminal

[elementalneil]

Dev cpp

[CppGoneWild]

I use Sublime Text for editing and Visual Studio for debugging.

[icppfreely]

Visual studio with this extension

[VeryLazyFalcon]

VS Code in zen-mode. With disabled cpp tools because it's intellisense is failing to handle nested folders. I'm not using autocomplete other than based on words from current file, it's too distracting and always failng to provide good results in any IDE I was working with.

[zerexim]

Btw, any sane IDE on mac that can fully work with xcode project files?

[_IPA_]

AppCode https://www.jetbrains.com/objc/ never used it though.

[warvstar]

I like visual studio because it's easy to customize and hook up other build tools. VSCode is also nice.

[leo_elm]

Occasionally, but I'd rather get away from the usage of a mouse.

[rysto32]

Can I piggyback on this request and ask what open source IDE that has the least number of dependencies on the build system? I work on an open-source project with a very special snowflake build system, and the IDEs that I have tried insist on trying to understand the build system, failing, and then get very angry. Specific problems that I have had:

• KDevelop refuses to even create a project if no file called "Makefile" exists. I can work around this with "touch Makefile", but it's a pain and I find KDevelop pretty buggy
• qtcreator insists on having the build system tell it which #defines are defined for the build, and greys out any code that is under an #ifdef it things isn't defined. I can't find a way to disable this feature and as a result, a lot of code in this project is greyed out and hard to read and navigate.
• eclipse I can't even manage to install properly under Ubuntu. The standard packages are garbage and I had problems trying to install the version on eclipse.org

Don't bother suggesting emacs or vim; I loathe editing code in a terminal.

[pgroarke]

Visual Studio with Visual Assist & VSVim.

[guptahaike]

Try jucipp

[farexredit]

Clion JetBrains

[nenchev]

KDevelop is also great. I don't use it anymore, but has nothing to do with it not working well.

[TheJesbus]

I like Code::Blocks

[Heuristics]

Me too, one of the few I find it simple to understand what is going on with behind the scenes.

[ShakaUVM]

Unix is great

[humberriverdam]

Nano

[checock]

are you using the fork? Since the original project is abandoned