best ide for c

[Louis LeBlanc]

On 01/03/05 03:28 PM, Alvaro Rosales sat at the `puter and typed:
> Hello guys,
> I  am learning how to program in C, Can yo recommend me  an IDE ?.
> Thank you in advance

Let the holy war begin :)

This is gonna get a lot of action.  It's been discussed here before,
and will be discussed many times in the future.

My personal favorite for C is Vim with ctags.  Ctags will help you
keep track of the modular interdependencies of your codebase, and Vim,
once you learn the interface, is very natural.  This will require more
work when you move on to OO programming languages like C++ and Java,
but it's great for Perl and shell scripting.

Of course, if you want to work with a real IDE, which will make object
hierarchy tracking much easier (in most cases), you probably want to
choose one that will let you work with other languages and maybe even
non-code projects.  One such IDE is Eclipse - it's in the ports under
java, and there are lots of plugins there as well, including the one
that will manage C/C++ projects.  I've even heard of it being used to
manage large documentation projects, and it was used to manage the
organization of the giant Eclipse users guide put out by Addison
Wesley.

Don't just pick one off the board though.  Read up on several and
narrow the list to a few.  Base your criteria on what you want to do,
what you'll want to do in the future (why learn one now, and another
one later?).  Any that do what you what to do now and what you will
probably do in the future should be on the list.  If you're sure
you'll be doing web development, eliminate any that don't handle HTML
and JSP.  If you expect to be sticking with C, my advice is spend a
weekend muddling through the Vim interface.

Install those that wind up on your short list and work with them.
Some notables that are sure to be mentioned are Anjuta, Bluefish,
CodeCrusader, KDEvelop and NetBeans.  All of these are available in
/usr/ports/devel/ or /usr/ports/java/.  Of these, I expect you'll hear
more about Anjuta and KDEvelop, but I highly recommend you put Eclipse
on your short list.

Good luck.

Lou
-- 
Louis LeBlanc               FreeBSD at keyslapper.org
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