Developer IDE choices on linux
posted on: 2010-05-15 09:47:28
I just wanted to take some time to talk about the tools which I use on a daily basis.
I will also confess that I spent the first 6 years of my professional career as a C#.Net developer. So before turning to open source alternatives I was used to a single option for my development needs, Visual Studio. And I must admit that initially I missed Visual Studio (this was and still is the only thing that I missed about windows I might add). I had spent 6 years of long days (and nights) using it to create and debug applications, and it took me time to find other environments I felt at home with.
Although there will be people amongst the Linux community who swear by traditional text editors such as VI, nano, gedit, kate, etc (although some except nano offer syntax highlighting). There has been vast improvements in the range and features of fully integrated IDE's available to us on Linux. Giving us extra tools and features to make our day to day existence a little easier. Such as debuggers, syntax highlighting, code completion, version control (i.e. SVN), cross file declaration tracing, code formating, etc.
Netbeans
The first is one that I use everyday in my day job, Netbeans. Before you judge this IDE because it is written in Java, I strongly recommend that you try it. It is fast, responsive and very mature feeling. It also supports most popular languages including Java, Ruby, C/C++, XML, HTML, PHP, Groovy (apparently), JavaScript, and JSP. It is also worth a mention that Netbeans is available on Linux, Windows and Mac OS. One big advantage of Netbeans is live parsing. Netbeans parses your code while you are typing, highlighting errors and providing auto complete suggestions. Netbeans has everything that you would come to expect from a fully mature IDE including features like refactoring, SVN support with integrated revision history browser and very good diff tool. If I have one gripe with Netbeans it would have to be that the scanning of projects you have currently loaded, that seems to take a half a minute or so at on start up and after an SVN commit (although I was informed by my good buddy Marijus, about the ScanOnDemand plugin available from the available plugins list).
Codelite
Secondly would be an editor I use for C++ development, Codelite. I don't know why I have taken to it, but I like it. This editor is another that is supported on multiple platforms, running on Linux, Windows, Mac OS and BSD. And it also comes with wxWidget libraries and project templates. Codelite also boasts the ability to import Microsoft Visual Studio workspace/projects and convert them to use a GNU style makefiles.
Anjuta
Again another very solid editor that I used before Codelite. Anjuta is an IDE provided through gnome projects written in C. It comes fully integrated with the Glade WYSIWYG tool for GTK+. Which makes this a strong contender for anyone considering developing gnome applications.
http://projects.gnome.org/anjuta/
Geany
Geany was my first editor on Linux. I chose it because it was light and fast. Geany supports the the many file types C/C++, Java, PHP, HTML, Python, Perl, Pascal. It has very few dependencies and just requires GTK2 runtime libraries and needs no additional packages on gnome or kde. Because of it's few dependencies it is known to run on many operating systems, even BSD and Solaris. In many ways it is very similar to a good text editor like gedit in terms of it's performance and simplicity, with extra features like symbol lists, code folding.
The following are some IDE's that I personally don't use, but are popular nonetheless (and I know I will get a booting if I don't mention them :) ).