C Good IDE for C/C++ programming that doesn't look like the 1990's??

Is there a single free IDE out there that does not look like it is from the 90's? Code::Blocks is fine but it seriously looks like the 1990's IDE in my old CS course book. VSCode is Microsoft bloatware but it both is and looks good. CLion is amazing but costs cash money and their new system detects if it has been installed on trial before. Geany is meh and just like Code::Blocks looks like ancient meme-ware.

Is there a single free IDE that actually has GUI/UX in mind and is not just another wx/QT shit project?

[Mod: Mind your language]
 
Is there a single free IDE out there that does not look like it is from the 90's? Code::Blocks is fine but it seriously looks like the 1990's IDE in my old CS course book. VSCode is Microsoft bloatware but it both is and looks good. CLion is amazing but costs cash money and their new system detects if it has been installed on trial before. Geany is meh and just like Code::Blocks looks like ancient meme-ware. Is there a single free IDE that actually has GUI/UX in mind and is not just another wx/QT shit project?

Ultimate++, all in one solution: https://www.ultimatepp.org/

BTW, QtCreator is really good. Why biased?
 
Anything beyond text is fluff. Reserve fireworks and pretty blinking lights for Windows....and now Linux.
It takes forever and is extremely error prone to code in, let say, leafpad (aka text only). This is funny bait though. VIM looks like a good alternative but the drawing events are slow asf in console and it utilizes really slow searching meaning finding a header file takes just a few too many seconds.
 
Ultimate++, all in one solution: https://www.ultimatepp.org/

BTW, QtCreator is really good. Why biased?
QtCreating is decent. It looks a lot better than most IDE's as well. The issue is the facts that it is a bit messy and very bloated.

U++ looks good from what I've seen, weird it is not in the upstream. Only one issue: is it a real software? Why is it not https? Is it asking for a phising scam? Dubious deployment but the IDE looks good though, might check it out. Thanks for the suggestion!
 
I find it interesting when one claims they struggle with writing code using text.
Struggle is a bit of a strong word for this one man, it is doable. If you want a big project finished this year, programming in a text editor is the image everyone sees when someone says "that is like shooting yourself in the leg." It is just slow, I'd take programming in geany or VSCode all days of the week instead of a text editor.
 
All the time the same discussion.

I never visited a carpenter’s forum, however, I imagine somebody ’s asking for recommendations for a CNC like work bench in order to increase production of sophisticated furnitures, and receives the answer that good carpenter’s can do it with a hand saw and a hammer, and that any furnitures that looks different from the design of those in the John Wayne WW movies are just too pretty fluff.

I use Xcode on Macs for huge FreeBSD (and other) projects, and only people, who use a pincers for putting their pants on, may perhaps come to the idea to do this with vi.
 
We always did everything as simple as possible and followed the "Unix is our IDE" philosophy and it worked pretty well for us all those decades.
 
  • Thanks
Reactions: a6h
Yes but there is far too much bandwagon jumping nowadays. VSCode is popular more because it's Microsoft based and people coming from a Windows background, not because it's superior in every way on Unix/BSD. It's just like the web. Angular was all the rage because Google uses it. React is all the rage cause Facebook uses it, not because it's good for everyone outside those realms.

And now Angular seems to be falling out of favor. People are starting to discover the problems of using React for everything. But now I'm drifting too far off topic.
 
  • Thanks
Reactions: a6h
geany isn't a text editor? VSCode doesn't edit text? If you aren't editing text with a text editor, how are you writing code at all? After all, all code is text.
What? This is quality meme right here. Just because something can edit text does not mean it is a "code editor". Example of your level of logic:

drhowarddrfine: "Wow what a nice toy car you have!"
Literally anyone else: "toy car? It's my new Tesla!"
drhowarddrfine: "It has wheels like a toy car! One might call it a shopping cart too because of its properties. You know, it has wheels!"
Everybody else: "Can we remove this creep?"

Your post would actually make me laugh if this would be a meme thread on the "misc" section, but I am asking an honest quesiton here. Bit funny though.
 
veryuniquename Bad timing for this comment but I would like you to watch your language and also realize this isn't reddit and we try to maintain a bit of proper decorum here. Personal attacks are looked down upon and won't get you anywhere.

My reply above was to your comment about using geany over using a text editor. I haven't used geany in years and forgot it has some level of an IDE in it. But you also stated that programming in a text editor is slow. However, in every IDE, you use that portion of it as a text editor to edit code--which was my point.

I might have another point about it somewhere but I just got home from working on a big project and I don't remember and maybe don't care either.
 
  • Thanks
Reactions: a6h
To all the people who think that an editor (like vi or emacs) and a command line is a sufficient as a development environment: If that works for you, great. For complex tasks, where actual coding is a small part of the workflow (most of the work is in design, review, discussion, testing, communication with other humans), and for compiled languages in large projects (where the code-compile-test cycle is by nature very long), it can work pretty well. For more more agile development styles, I have my doubts whether you can reach your best productivity that way, but that's between you and your manager. For many types of tasks (like interactive data analysis, development in non-compiled languages, tasks that involve graphics such as image or video processing and data analysis that involves graps), the old-fashioned workflow with emacs or vi is nearly always very inefficient.

Is there a single free IDE out there that does not look like it is from the 90's?
What do you mean by "look like it is from the 90's"? The color scheme? Visual design? Underlying technology? You need to be much more specific. Admittedly, much has changed in visual design in the last 20 years. Font strokes have become much narrower (enabled by higher resolution displays), we are using shades of grey instead of of black and white and much more colorizing (enabled by much higher contrast displays than the CRTs we used in the 90s), and we do lots of things like subtle shading and rounding to give visual cues. Some people wonder whether this is actually progress or not. Certain aspects of modern visual design are clearly not progress; for example the trend towards using shades of grey with light font strokes creates serious accessibility problems for people with bad eyesight; instead of using the power that modern hardware has given us to help make things more visible (in particular to partially disabled coders), we're using them to either look pretty, or communicate other intent.

VSCode is Microsoft bloatware ...
Why is it bloatware? I don't see it as needing terribly much in terms of resources, compared to other graphical development environments. And in today's environment (where the critical resource in short supply is human brains and human time, not CPU or memory), trading off more usage of computers for creating human efficiency is nearly always a great move.

But what gets me really upset is: There are way too many people (idiots?) who automatically hate everything Microsoft does, and who throw terms like "bloatware" around for no good reason. Just because it is Microsoft doesn't mean it is bad, nor does it mean that is inefficient.
 
QtCreating is decent. It looks a lot better than most IDE's as well. The issue is the facts that it is a bit messy and very bloated.

U++ looks good from what I've seen, weird it is not in the upstream. Only one issue: is it a real software? Why is it not https? Is it asking for a phising scam? Dubious deployment but the IDE looks good though, might check it out. Thanks for the suggestion!
If you want https: https://www.ultimatepp.org/

I modified my browser's setting to not force https.
 
I've been helping another team at work evaluate IDEs for C++ recently. The 3 they started looking at were Qt Creator, vscode and NetBeans (that's my influence, lots of Sun baggage). IMO they are all much of a muchness GUI wise, pretty similar in terms of features. I find NetBeans better for navigation, but Qt Creator better for searching code. At work we have a large code base (many millions of lines of code). How the IDE copes with that is, for me, the main issue.

- RAM. Particularly Java based IDEs can consume many 10s of Gbytes when loading a large project, which can make them very unwieldy.
- "Code Model" This is _the_ big thing, and the USP for this kind of environment. The code model is what will allow the IDE to do smart navigation - jumping between definition/declaration/uses, refactoring, opening headers etc etc. Sadly there is an infinite number of bad build systems. And the IDE needs to grok the build system in order to build an impeccable code model - it needs to know all of the include paths and compilation macros.

My advice is to try a few IDEs and see which one works best with your project(s).

If you ware working on an open source project then JetBrains does offer licenses for CLion. The conditions seem fairly stringent.
 
The "old fashioned workflow" for us never involved vim or emacs alone. We used the FreeBSD system as a whole to develop software. FreeBSD has all the tools one needs to do what someone else's IDE does but, as said, it might depend on what you are working on. The emacs guys had their own environment they built themselves and I'd put that up against any IDE.

The problem with someone else's IDE is you do things the way that IDE does things. We were able to do things the way we wanted to do things.
 
To all the people who think that an editor (like vi or emacs) and a command line is a sufficient as a development environment: If that works for you, great. For complex tasks, where actual coding is a small part of the workflow (most of the work is in design, review, discussion, testing, communication with other humans), and for compiled languages in large projects (where the code-compile-test cycle is by nature very long), it can work pretty well. For more more agile development styles, I have my doubts whether you can reach your best productivity that way, but that's between you and your manager. For many types of tasks (like interactive data analysis, development in non-compiled languages, tasks that involve graphics such as image or video processing and data analysis that involves graps), the old-fashioned workflow with emacs or vi is nearly always very inefficient.


What do you mean by "look like it is from the 90's"? The color scheme? Visual design? Underlying technology? You need to be much more specific. Admittedly, much has changed in visual design in the last 20 years. Font strokes have become much narrower (enabled by higher resolution displays), we are using shades of grey instead of of black and white and much more colorizing (enabled by much higher contrast displays than the CRTs we used in the 90s), and we do lots of things like subtle shading and rounding to give visual cues. Some people wonder whether this is actually progress or not. Certain aspects of modern visual design are clearly not progress; for example the trend towards using shades of grey with light font strokes creates serious accessibility problems for people with bad eyesight; instead of using the power that modern hardware has given us to help make things more visible (in particular to partially disabled coders), we're using them to either look pretty, or communicate other intent.


Why is it bloatware? I don't see it as needing terribly much in terms of resources, compared to other graphical development environments. And in today's environment (where the critical resource in short supply is human brains and human time, not CPU or memory), trading off more usage of computers for creating human efficiency is nearly always a great move.

But what gets me really upset is: There are way too many people (idiots?) who automatically hate everything Microsoft does, and who throw terms like "bloatware" around for no good reason. Just because it is Microsoft doesn't mean it is bad, nor does it mean that is inefficient.
What I mean by "looks like it is from the 90's" is if you've ever tried to do cross platform, or even platform specific, GUI programming then the default is usually identical in version 3.0 as in 1.0 (let's say released in 2005 and 3.0 released in 2019). The GUI of most IDE's is identical to the style of OS's back in the day. It is blocky with weird shadow effects. The shadows aren't subtle and fading but rather quite drastic and obvious.

By bloatware I mean data mining and data collection. I am fully aware that VSCode is quite efficient, if not one of the most efficient IDE's out there. However there is a lot of space wasted on data collection and other really dumb, clearly for exploitation, features. Not only that, but I had an incident where I used Microsoft Visual Studio working on a bigger project with a team and one dreadful morning we opened Visual Studio and it had updated. This was despite we specifically not wanting that and had turned of everything related to update, etc. We had done this because the previous month had an incident were our Windows 10 computer had rebooted and updated mid calculation. This cost us some 30K USD and a client. Microsoft bloatware updates and changes whenever it wants even though you have "a guarantee word" from their support that the changed we make are correct and the program "will not update and change the layout of all the code and undo the latest saves." Their IDE's and other programs are amazing, with the huge caviat of being the only set of software that runs the risc of undo-ing all your work and making unwanted changes. Amazing features, good looking but poor execution. Rant done.
 
www/bluefish, the description says it's for HTML, but it's also for C, Python, SQL, PHP and Apache.

Included language definition files for:
  • Ada
  • ASP .NET and VBS
  • C/C++
  • CSS
  • CFML
  • Clojure
  • D
  • gettext PO
  • Google Go
  • HTML, XHTML and HTML5
  • Java and JSP
  • JavaScript and jQuery
  • Lua
  • Octave/MATLAB
  • MediaWiki
  • NSIS
  • Pascal
  • Perl
  • PHP
  • Python
  • R
  • Ruby
  • SASS
  • Shell
  • Scheme
  • SQL
  • SVG
  • Vala
  • Wordpress
  • XML
 
Last edited:
Not only that, but I had an incident where I used Microsoft Visual Studio working on a bigger project with a team and one dreadful morning we opened Visual Studio and it had updated. This was despite we specifically not wanting that and had turned of everything related to update, etc. We had done this because the previous month had an incident were our Windows 10 computer had rebooted and updated mid calculation. This cost us some 30K USD and a client.
This is frankly not very convincing. I mean, uninterruptible calculations in Visual Studio? Definitely "cool story" tier.
 
Back
Top