What tools does Linux programmer use to develop programs? [closed]

Even if some real men with beards might say that Emacs (or vi) > Eclipse > Netbeans > all, many users do use IDEs. Actually, the veracity of the previous statement doesn't really matter, just use a tool you're productive with and, ideally, a right one for the job. Here is a quick choice list:

• Emacs, vi(m): multi-languages, I'm sure they are still used for C/C++ development
• gedit: multi-languages, advanced text editor, very good for Rails (can be pimped to mimic Textmate)
• Geany: another text editor based on the GTK2 toolkit
• Eclipse, Netbeans, Intellij IDEA Java oriented but with nice support of C/C++ (and PHP, Groovy, Grails, Rails)
• MonoDevelop: for .NET development (i.e. support a bunch of languages)
• QT Creator: for... QT development
• Anjuta, KDevelop: C/C++ IDEs for Gnome and KDE (respectively)
• Code::Blocks: cross platform C++ IDE

As you can see, GNU/Linux doesn't mean coding in a 80 columns shell (potentially opened through ssh). Linux has some kick ass tools too. To be honest, I find that Linux is a much better development platform than Windows: it has many good IDEs which are at least equivalent (except maybe for .NET, I'm not sure that MonoDevelop can compete with Visual Studio), it has much more command line tools, more scripting capabilities, it gives better control... In other words, I feel much more powerful with Linux than Windows.

No, it is not true. People just use what they prefer most. The definition of IDE is also a bit weak. On Linux, many text editors are very powerful, for example Emacs. You could perhaps call that text editor already an IDE. Though, to point out a difference, Emacs (and other text editors) were originally made to be very general and write just anything with it, and handy tools/functions for developing C/C++/whatever were added later. And their programming language support mostly* only covers syntax highlighting, not much more.

Applications like KDevelop or Eclipse were initially developed to be a development environment and most of these still have more/better functionality to develop. I call these IDEs.

There are many different IDEs on Linux, some more powerful, some less powerful, some for one specific programming language, some for many different. Depending what language you want to write in, some are better than others.

Also, some are more bloated than others. That is one of the main reasons people just use a text editor because it is very snappy, very stable and very fast.

I'll list some IDEs which I think are the best in term of functionality specific to that language (like code completion and many other stuff).

For C/C++:

1. KDevelop

   For what I know there is no IDE which has better support for C/C++. I didn't found any other tool which handles C++ in such a way that it really understands STL, which is important that you can use autocompletion for STL containers and such stuff. It even understands macros, so autocompletion even works in very complicated cases with many macro-tricks. I work on a ~250k loc C++ project and it has understood the full code. (To use the extended C/C++ support though, you have to activate it in project settings, it is disabled by default. Also, to have full STL support, I preparsed the STL headers and added that to the C++ support in project settings manually. Don't know if that is still needed. But I guess it still doesn't work out-of-the-box.)

   Also, KDevelop is very snappy and fast (developed itself in C++), compared to many other IDEs. It loads almost as fast as any other simple text editor and feels as snappy as such. And that also doesn't change for very big projects. Whereby I myself just use it for editing/writing the code, not managing the compiling of the project. It has automake support but I prefer to use CMake. But KDevelop works fine with that: when I press compile in KDevelop, it just starts a make.

   Initially, KDevelop was developed as a development tool for KDE applications but it works fine for any C/C++ project. I actually have never done any Qt/KDE project with it. Also, support for other languages like Ada were added later on but I haven't tried that.

   I don't know any other IDE which has better support for C++. Please comment me if I am wrong here. I didn't checked many other IDEs anymore in the last one or two years.

2. Eclipse

   You probably know that already. Initially it was developed in and for Java. Later, support for C/C++ was added.

   I want to note this IDE because I know many people using it. I am not really recommending it though because I have mostly made bad experiences.

   The C++ support is good, not perfect though; there are cases where autocompletion doesn't work.

   The possibilities and features of the IDE itself are very rich. I don't know many other IDEs which are such big (bloated). That, together that it is in Java, makes it often feel very slow and sometimes hanging while you are writing something. Also the memory usage is very high.

3. Qt Creator

   Initially for Qt development, but also fine for any other C/C++ projects. Very good qmake support.

   The C++ support is nice, only some smaller problems. Also, the IDE is snappy and fast.

   After all, I found myself a bit too limited in this IDE and the C++ support in KDevelop was still better, so I kept using KDevelop for most C++ projects. But when you do a Qt project, Qt Creator is great because it also comes with some nice GUI builders for Qt and other nice Qt tools.

4. CLion

   (Commercial, but free version.) A newcomer by JetBrains. Very promising.

For Java:

1. Eclipse

   See my comments above.

   For Java, I think this is the most common IDE on Linux. The same disadvantages as noted above apply here also but I don't know any better IDE, so I keep using Eclipse when I develop in Java.

2. NetBeans

   Also in and for Java. Never tried that because it was not really supported in my Linux distribution (I think because of licensing issues, don't remember exactly anymore).

   I have seen many flames in the past about NetBeans-vs-Eclipse. Don't know actually about the current state.

For C#:

1. MonoDevelop

   Also haven't tried that myself, only have heard that it is one of the best tools for C#. Just wanted to note that because you referred to Visual Studio and you may be interested in C#.

I want to add some words to the usage of the terminal:

In addition to such an IDE, it is very common to use a terminal in parallel to your IDE. The terminal and all its shells together with all the Unix tools and other tools is very powerfull and you can do many tasks in a very simple way. Once you get a good overview over all the Unix tools and how to use them, they can save you a lot of work.

There are often tasks in a project which needs to be done again and again. That can be simple tasks like how you manage your source code and distribute it with your teammates or also more complex tasks.

For example, when you do some server-client work and start perhaps 10 servers and 100 clients on different machines, let them all doing something; then grep the output for some regular expressions and collect all that and do some performance tests over 10 seconds and repeat that progress several times - such things are all trivial once you manage the terminal.

You will find yourself ending up having just several scripts written which do all that for you. Writing such scripts is mostly straight-forward.

This goes perhaps a bit off-topic but I just wanted to have that noted because it is a common and powerfull way to work. When you switched from Windows to Linux as a developer, you should take a look at all those additional possibilities you have now. Those are the main reason for me (and many others) why I prefer developing on Linux/Unix than on any other system.

(*) Again some words to Emacs: Emacs can be extended my many tools and plugins which make it a very rich system with the same functionality as an IDE. For example, there is CEDET which comes with real language support, i.e. you also have features like smart word completion / IntelliSense and also a project management system. I haven't tried it myself but I will do that in the next weeks.

There are a large number of IDE's that run on Linux (and other Unix systems) ...

Probably what you heard is related to the fact that the entire Unix system is a kind of a development environment. "Small" programs like id-utils, vi, vim, and emacs, plus the CLI tools, make the entire system into a sort of hybrid development system. The philosophy is quite different from the IDE style, so don't expect to understand it immediately.

I spent a number of years developing Java on Eclipse under Windows, which I enjoyed. But before and after that, I used Unix, NetBSD, and Linux for development. I'm perfectly happy developing C, C++, PHP or Ruby just with vi(1) and the other CLI tools. I've never tried serious Java development on Unix. That might take me back to the IDE's, partly because of the amount of boilerplate needed, and partly because Java has quite elaborate IDE support. But to get the marginal IDE added value for !Java is just not worth the pain or worth giving up the instant-on nature of vi(1) and Terminal and all the other Unix elements, which kind of vanish when you start the IDE.

Once inside the IDE, the outside OS doesn't matter any more. I think, ahem, that's why I liked using the IDE on Win and not so much on Unix. Unix is flexible and fun, and doesn't need to be replaced as an environment.