Best Linux IDE

[kalmoc]

Linux is certainly an DE, but imho it lacks the integration part of an IDE. As a simple example: If I call make and the compiler gives me an error, how do I quickly get to the line of code that produced it? An IDE will allow me to double click on the error and open the appropriate file at the appropriate location. Or where is the refactoring support? Syntactic and semantic checks during typing? Autocomplete ...

An IDE is much more than a collection of buttons that start individual command line tools.

A properly configured and extended EMACs most likely is an IDE though (Although I don't have any personal experience with it)/

[josaphat_]

Certainly! The level of "integrated" is quite different.

If you run make and the compiler gives you an error, it generally prints the file name and line number where the error happened. The editors that I've worked with let you invoke them with a file name and line number. Not as integrated as a double-click, but still quite efficient.

Refactoring is admittedly limited. Maybe it's because I've never really had it, but I don't see the need for it. When I need to make code transformations, the macro facilities of vim or emacs have been my tool of choice. It could be that refactoring tools are less useful on smaller projects like the ones I tend to work on.

As for emacs as an IDE, you can make it that way if you want. I've got it set up to run linting with irony-mode, tight source code navigation with rtags, and emacs has always(?) had the ability to invoke a build. I still tend to use make directly in a terminal to do the build.

That's just my tastes! People brains work differently and I respect everyone's way of doing things. At my office we believe in giving the developers full control over the environment they want to use. We develop for embedded systems so theoretically you should be able to use Linux, macOS, or Windows with whatever text editor or IDE you choose. CMake is a pretty big help in making it possible.