Software Engineering Stack Exchange
Software Engineering Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [ide]

IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) are computer programs that facilitate efficient software development by providing features beyond those of a simple text editor.

An IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a computer program that facilitates software development by providing features beyond that of a simple text editor. Some typical IDE features are debugger/ support, tools/support, design tools and even performance analysis tools.

An IDE is intended to maximize a developer/programmer's productivity by providing a stream-lined interface tuned to the task of software development. A modern full-featured IDE includes advanced features such as preemptive hints (when typing the first character of a variable name, for example), and tools to analyze the program at run-time (such as a debugger).

List of Some Free IDEs

139 questions
130
votes
45 answers

Does giving a developer a slower development machine result in faster/more efficient code?

Suppose I give my developers a screaming fast machine. WPF-based VS2010 loads very quickly. The developer then creates a WPF or WPF/e application that runs fine on his box, but much slower in the real world. This question has two parts... 1) If I…
makerofthings7
  • 6,038
  • 4
  • 39
  • 77
80
votes
20 answers

Is a company order to switch to a certain IDE a red flag?

I recently joined a rapidly growing startup. In the past 3 months the development team has grown from 4 to 12. Until now they were very laissez-faire about what developers used to do their work. In fact one of the things I initially found…
Justin Alexander
  • 219
  • 1
  • 3
  • 5
66
votes
7 answers

How is IntelliJ better than Eclipse?

I know there have been questions like What is your favorite editor/IDE?, but none of them have answered this question: Why spend the money on IntelliJ when Eclipse is free? I'm personally a big IntelliJ fan, but I haven't really tried Eclipse. I've…
Nicole
  • 28,111
  • 12
  • 95
  • 143
65
votes
9 answers

How do you debug without an IDE?

Every time I look for an IDE (currently i'm tinkering with Go), I find a thread full of people recommending Vi, Emacs, Notepad++ etc. I've never done any development outside of an IDE; I guess I've been spoiled. How do you debug without an IDE? Are…
ConditionRacer
  • 5,682
  • 6
  • 38
  • 56
62
votes
11 answers

Does anyone prefer proportional fonts?

I was reading the wikipedia article on programming style and noticed something in an argument against vertically aligned code: Reliance on mono-spaced font; tabular formatting assumes that the editor uses a fixed-width font. Most modern code…
Jason Baker
  • 9,625
  • 8
  • 44
  • 67
57
votes
11 answers

IDEs for dynamic languages - how far can you get?

I find it frustrating how the speed of development that dynamic languages should offer gets significantly compromised by the lack of completions and other assets that IDEs would give you in their static counterparts. It's not just about typing less…
deprecated
  • 3,297
  • 3
  • 20
  • 26
51
votes
9 answers

Comparison of IDEs for C++ and C development on Linux: KDevelop, Eclipse, NetBeans, CodeBlocks and Anjuta

I'd like to note your experience of full scale IDEs on Linux. I personally work mostly with vim, however other programmers would like to see a real IDE. So I'd like to hear your personal opinion about different IDEs and comparison between them, in…
Artyom
  • 2,079
  • 4
  • 17
  • 17
44
votes
11 answers

Is C# development effectively inseparable from the IDE you use?

I'm a Python programmer learning C# who is trying to stop worrying and just love C# for what it is, rather than constantly comparing it back to Python. I'm caught up on one point: the lack of explicitness about where things are defined, as detailed…
Ghopper21
  • 872
  • 1
  • 7
  • 15
41
votes
20 answers

Time to drop Emacs and vi?

Every time you are looking for a text editor, no matter what language you are using, vi and Emacs are hall-of-famers. However they are ancient, and we have better alternatives (at least I hope we do). Why are developers stuck on these two editors?…
Chiron
  • 4,543
  • 3
  • 28
  • 37
41
votes
16 answers

What justifies the use of an IDE versus a standard editor?

I find myself using my text editor of choice (vim, nano, gedit, pick your poison) much more often than any IDE as of late. After noticing my ide shortcuts getting dusty I started to think about this and wonder: what justifies use of an IDE for you…
Chris
  • 5,663
  • 3
  • 28
  • 39
35
votes
16 answers

Should newbies use IDE autocomplete (Intellisense)?

I often encounter this when I am helping out someone who is new to programming and learning it for the first time. I'm talking about really new newbies, still learning about OOness, constructing objects, method calls and stuff like that. Usually,…
codinguser
  • 251
  • 1
  • 3
  • 7
34
votes
16 answers

I use an IDE (Eclipse) to develop software. Why should I switch to vim or emacs?

My day job is java/web developer. I have been using eclipse for ~5years. I think its excellent and I also use Webstorm for javascript and html/jsp. I do on occasion need to ssh into server and mess around with config files; for this I use vi and…
NimChimpsky
  • 4,627
  • 4
  • 26
  • 39
32
votes
4 answers

What counts as an IDE?

Recently reading the question What languages do you use without an IDE? One question asked in a few answers was "is Notepad++ and IDE?" One answers to the original question said "None, I use vim...", implying that vim is an IDE. But then another…
Matt Ellen
  • 3,368
  • 4
  • 30
  • 37
30
votes
16 answers

Most useful features of VIM that aren't standard in a IDE

I'm considering whether I should start using VIM again instead of an IDE. What are the most useful features of VIM that aren't standard in an IDE?
Casebash
  • 7,662
  • 5
  • 41
  • 62
28
votes
2 answers

How can I debug a JSP?

I'm trying to edit a JSP for a project and I'm getting a NullPointerException somewhere in the JSP when it's requested from my server. My web server (JBoss) is reporting the exception, but it's giving me a bogus line number. It's reporting that the…
ampersandre
  • 391
  • 1
  • 4
  • 8
1
2 3
…
9 10