Buddha, Wow, what a great explanation! Thanks much.
I am currently reading the Emacs manual and plan to investigate QtCreator and Eclipse based on the recommendations above. Anjuta is no longer a consideration based on negative reviews that I read. AFAIK, QtCreator does not address 'C'. I presume C and C++ are similar enough to suffice. There is a great comparison page on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_integrated_development_environments#C.2FC.2B.2B I will keep you posted. Thanks to all for your input. Paul On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 11:13 AM, Buddha Buck <blaisepas...@gmail.com>wrote: > Paul, > > As should be clear from the other responses, there's no clear "if you work > in C/C++, then this is the IDE you should use". Both languages have been > around for a very long time (C since the early 1970's, C++ since the mid > 1980's), and have been used across a large number of different > environments, there's no category-killer. > > Both C and C++ are old enough languages that they have a certain amount of > cruft in their design with makes it hard for IDEs to get their hooks into > them to provide "advanced" services. For instance, while there are > "refactoring" tools for Java and C# that work with popular IDEs for those > languages, there are none for C/C++. So most IDEs for C/C++ are mainly > glorified text editors with syntax highlighting and shortcuts to call > compilers, source control systems, debuggers, and other development tools. > There are source browsers available (allowing you to go to function/class > definitions, etc), but they are generally not as sophisticated as those in > newer languages. > > It should be noted that in Linux/Unix, all the development tools are > command-line based, and so any IDE is going to call make, gcc, git, gdb, > javac, etc behind the scenes anyway to do the actual work. > > So which you choose is more a matter of taste than functionality. > Everyone is going to prefer the one they are most familiar with. > > That said, here are the choices I can speak to: > > Emacs -- This is an old extensible text editor, nearly as old as C. Since > it is older than most windowing interfaces, it is very much geared towards > usage on a terminal -- keyboard based commands, fixed window size, > monospace type, etc. It has, in the past decade or so, added some ability > to be used with a mouse, but the keyboard is really the way to use it. > Since it is designed to be extensible (it uses elisp, a language similar > to the Guile language GnuCash uses), it has a lot of features available (in > the 1980's it's desktop icon was a kitchen sink). As far as an IDE goes, > it provides all the basic hooks so you don't have to leave the program in > order to develop, and it has support to handle a large number of languages. > Emacs has a reputation for being heavyweight and larded with features, but > I've found that compared to modern editors with a fraction of the > capabilities, it's rather lightweight and spry. The old joke that the name > means "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" is meaningless when your > browser can take a gig of memory. > > Vi -- This is almost as old as Emacs, but wasn't originally written to be > quite as extensible. Like Emacs, it's text-and-keyboard oriented. It > provides syntax highlighting, but I'm not sure about hooks to other tools. > I don't use it for development myself, that much. It has always been > considered lightweight compared to Emacs. > > Eclipse -- Eclipse is a modern development environment, and provides lots > of bells and whistles, especially for Java development. I haven't really > used it for C/C++ development, though. > > I've not used many others. QtCreator is probably well designed for C++, > and if you do other work with Qt it's probably a good, familiar choice. If > not, it may be another set of libraries and dependencies to install. > > > > On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 2:05 AM, Paul Conrady <audio1...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> This is not a question about GnuCash per se. Since I would like to >> contribute >> to the development of GnuCash, I thought the developer's here might be the >> best source of information. >> >> I want to start coding in "C" and "C++". Please recommend an IDE for me. >> After searching through the Ubuntu and Canonical repos, I am leaning >> toward >> Anjuta DevStudio or maybe CodeLite. Since I am learning the language, all >> that I require is a simple interface; nothing complex. >> >> Thank you for your help. >> >> Paul >> >> >> >> -- >> View this message in context: >> http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/Recommend-IDE-for-coding-in-C-tp4660556.html >> Sent from the GnuCash - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> gnucash-devel mailing list >> gnucash-devel@gnucash.org >> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel >> > > _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
