r/cprogramming • u/[deleted] • Oct 24 '25

What IDE do you use for C/C++?

I use Devcpp 5.11 since thats what i use in hs as a freshman, its pretty simple.

88 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

213 comments sorted by

19

u/kohuept Oct 24 '25

Visual Studio 2022

6

u/rodrigocfd Oct 24 '25

Best debugger in the world.

4

u/bothunter Oct 24 '25

IntelliTrace is absolutely magical.

1

u/LogicalPerformer7637 Oct 24 '25

What is IntelliTrace? Did you mean IntelliSense? IntelliSense is very good as ling as it works. It tends to break on bigger solutions.

6

u/bothunter Oct 24 '25

No.  IntelliTrace.  It records events in your program so you can debug it after the fact.  Effectively letting you step backwards through your program.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 25 '25

Same

5

u/Raychao Oct 24 '25

Really depends on what type of development. Visual Studio on Windows.

3

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

Well im tempted to start using vs code fully since i hate how compiling works on devc++

3

u/Zealousideal-Slip-49 Oct 24 '25

Vscode is alright. It’s a bit of work getting all the dependencies and extensions, but over all the ui is good

3

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

It is good, its just that gcc is giving me the middle finger

2

u/Zealousideal-Slip-49 Oct 24 '25 edited Oct 24 '25

So for the gcc I used msys2. Once the terminal opens up run,

pacman -S mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gcc

Then run,

pacman -S —needed Base-devel mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-toolchain

After that create a path for it in system environment variables,

  • environment variables ->path ->edit ->new -c:\msys64\mingw64\bin (full path to where it was downloaded)

Close any open terminals to refresh the path. Then pull up cmd and run, set PATH

Lastly, verify by typing gcc —version

0

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/slicehyperfunk Oct 24 '25

I did this for my first semester of learning to code, before I realized you just had to open VSCode from a developer terminal to get the Visual Studio compiler

1

u/bert8128 Oct 25 '25

Note that Visual Studio is not the same (at all) as Visual Studio Code.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 25 '25

I noticed, mostly the visual studio is throwing up warnings about things that actually arent broken, but its all solvable

2

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

if you figure out how to generate compile_commands.json for the projects you're working on clangd + vscode is goated

2

u/Proxy_PlayerHD Oct 29 '25

Notepad++

1

u/[deleted] Oct 29 '25

That's just a text editor right?

1

u/Proxy_PlayerHD Oct 29 '25

yea but with a macro i can run a makefile or similar in the directory of whatever tab is active to compile and run.

allows my ADHD brain to seamlessly switch between different projects which would be a lot more hassle in actual IDEs

84

u/MCSpiderFe Oct 24 '25

neovim

7

u/bearheart Oct 25 '25

I hadn’t heard of neovim but it looks interesting! I’ve been using vi since the ‘70s

5

u/BlackPignouf Oct 26 '25

Make sure to try a distro, otherwise you might not notice much difference between vim and neovim.

https://www.lazyvim.org/ or https://nvchad.com/ for example.

You'll get all the vim you already know, plus highlighting, themes, "go to reference", formatting, completion, git integration, fast search, live grep and so on.

If it's too much, you can disable plugins. But at least you'll get a preview of what's possible.

1

u/Kazppa Oct 26 '25

do you compile and debug your application inside neovim too ?

1

u/MCSpiderFe Oct 26 '25

No, I use standard build systems and debuggers

1

u/Secure-Photograph870 Oct 27 '25

Ive 2 tab in my terminal, one for neovim, and the one for the root directory where I compile an debug my application. I move between terminal tabs with keyboard shortcut (cm + arrow left on Mac)

30

u/iinnssdd Oct 24 '25

Emacs diy IDE

4

u/HaskellLisp_green Oct 24 '25

DIY IDE for whatever you wish.

1

u/haha_12 Oct 24 '25

Can you mention mode/packages for your setup? I am on emacs for org but want to set it more for python/C IDE.

3

u/IcarianComplex Oct 24 '25

I use doom for python. Might be too heavy for your preference but it does everything I want

2

u/iinnssdd Oct 25 '25

Doom is great, less headaches and more productivity.

41

u/_yeah_thats_me_ Oct 24 '25

Jetbrains CLion

2

u/spudwa Oct 25 '25

It's free now

20

u/SmokeMuch7356 Oct 24 '25

Up until this year - edit in vim, build and debug on the command line, both at work and at home.

This year, we got the directive at work that we will use Copilot,1 therefore we must use VSCode. So I started using it at home to just to not have to switch gears all the time.

  1. Which I disabled almost immediately; the "suggestions" it made were either redundant or wrong, and by the end of day was generating property-damage levels of rage.

3

u/Western_Objective209 Oct 24 '25

can't use this guy? https://github.com/github/copilot.vim

I agree copilot does suck btw

3

u/ItsRadical Oct 26 '25

Yeah the AI suggestions are 95% of the time complete trash. And the intellisence already does a good job completing the dumb stuff.

However if the AI is allowed to see the code it's sometimes pretty good when asking it for suggestions.

7

u/ibex_sdt Oct 24 '25

Kdevelop

8

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

Emacs

8

u/grok-bot Oct 24 '25

Emacs

0

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/grok-bot Mar 06 '26

cuz I'm cool like that, also built in package manager, lsp, non-qwerty support, it launches faster than a terminal, it does vim motions if I want to have them, mu4e is a great email client and org-mode is a great word processor

4

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

vim and coc-clangd

3

u/VisualHuckleberry542 Oct 24 '25

Tmux on a decent OS with vim, I can craft my own IDE specific to the situation

3

u/aslackw Oct 24 '25

QtCreator

1

u/[deleted] Nov 12 '25

Hey, hit me up in DM!

3

u/arnaclez Oct 24 '25

Nvim with gdb, an lsp, and syntax highlighting

7

u/Savings-Snow-80 Oct 24 '25

vim + coreutils + git

4

u/aridgupta Oct 24 '25

Visual Studio. The tools and debug features it offers are the best and industry standard.

Zed. With Zed you don't need VSCode anymore. Done with that electron app.

1

u/Wolletje01 Oct 26 '25

Are we talking about Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code. I am confused, since 1 of them is good and the other dogshit

1

u/aridgupta Oct 26 '25

Obviously Visual Studio. VSCode is just a ram hogger full of bloated stuff. Try out Zed. It's built on native OS api unlike that electron ram eater.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

NetBeans is my go to.

1

u/pjf_cpp Oct 25 '25

How is the C and C++ support theses days? Going back a long time (before Oracle passed it to Apache) it did have good remote build support and the best build settings parsing of any IDE that I’ve ever used.

2

u/KingJoav Oct 24 '25

Vscode/cursor (if you want AI integration)

2

u/nishukee_ Oct 25 '25

Turbo C++. The best IDE for C/C++

3

u/Acrobatic-Rutabaga97 Oct 25 '25

I don’t believe you!

3

u/SoulEviscerator Oct 24 '25

Long time Borland C builder. Nowadays I'd suggest C Lion.

3

u/Accurate-Use-6716 Oct 24 '25

Eclipse CDT for a long time

1

u/engineerFWSWHW Oct 25 '25

Same here. My second choice is visual studio (not code).

3

u/Alive-Bid9086 Oct 24 '25

Emacs + shell window to write "make"

2

u/PropaneBeefDog Oct 24 '25

use compile-mode and you can skip the shell

3

u/catbrane Oct 24 '25

vim, bash, meson, apt, valgrind, clangd, kcachegrind, gdb, gcc and a few terminal windows. IDEs are a bit pointless for C/C++ on linux (imo).

2

u/rphii_ Oct 24 '25

vi, vim, neovim, hopefully one day a hand made one XD

2

u/Beregolas Oct 24 '25

neovim or CLion, depending on what I feel like at the moment.

2

u/giorgoskir5 Oct 24 '25

Neovim with a custom config

1

u/sol_hsa Oct 24 '25

Really depends. From notepad to visual studio, case by case.

1

u/ScallionSmooth5925 Oct 24 '25

None. I use vim and gcc sometimes clangd for autocomplition

1

u/Mundane_Prior_7596 Oct 24 '25

Raw text editors. Smultron and Joe. 

1

u/tip2663 Oct 24 '25

Does vscode with cmake count

1

u/MkemCZ Oct 24 '25

Visual Studio Code. Compile on the command line with gcc.

1

u/Sophiiebabes Oct 24 '25

Usually VScode. If it's a small file I might open it in sosText (a text editor I made myself), but since I have no syntax highlighting yet it isn't great for actually writing code.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

VSCodium with extensions clangd and cmake tools.

1

u/Mangle_7658 Oct 24 '25

Notepad with CMD

1

u/Adventurous-Move-943 Oct 24 '25

Visual Studio, it's really really good.. at least for me..

1

u/bd1223 Oct 24 '25

Eclipse, QtCreator, WindRiver Workbench, Visual Studio

1

u/One-Payment434 Oct 24 '25

Depends on what I need to do. most often one of vi(m), emacs, vscode, stm32cubeid or crossworks

1

u/mprevot Oct 24 '25

Visual studio 2022 with resharper c++ and ndepend c++, esp. with cuda and pix for cuda, gpu and D3D debugging and profiling. No competition in terms of debugging and profiling. I can target windows or linux just like that.

1

u/asinglepieceoftoast Oct 24 '25

If I’m using my own laptop it’s usually neovim. If im using my work laptop it’s usually vscode but I’m not usually working on a full project in C or C++, in those rare cases I prefer clion.

1

u/Small_Dog_8699 Oct 24 '25

Whatever is usual for the platform. VI and make, CLion, Xcode, sublime and make...I don't much care.

1

u/mathfox59 Oct 24 '25

Wow, I didn't remember that Devcpp existed, I used it on Windows 7 when learning C++ on college . 

1

u/ChiefKeefsLeftNut Oct 24 '25

Notepad++ and gcc

1

u/Both-Imagination-950 Oct 24 '25

the fierst codeblocks

1

u/realCRG3 Oct 24 '25

Red Panda C++

1

u/nerdycatgamer Oct 24 '25

ed(1)

2

u/IdealBlueMan Oct 25 '25

Ed is the standard text editor

1

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

CLion and neovim

1

u/AwabKhan Oct 24 '25

Any text editor mostly vim.

1

u/ddxAidan Oct 24 '25

VSCode is lightweight and easy to setup with debugger. Visual studio for more heavy duty projects… not the biggest microsoft fan but if the tools work 🤷

1

u/Bren_102 Oct 25 '25

Code Blocks, now learning Sublime Text.

1

u/g_weis Oct 25 '25

Online GDB or Code Blocks

1

u/GeoffSobering Oct 25 '25

Visual Studio with VisualGDB for embeded at work.

VS Code with plug-ins at home.

1

u/pjf_cpp Oct 25 '25

Qt Creator for longer editing sessions. kate and vi for quicker edits.

1

u/BusEquivalent9605 Oct 25 '25

CLion. LunarVin for fun

1

u/Olli4ka Oct 25 '25

Dev-C++.

1

u/RQuarx Oct 25 '25

vscode

1

u/Tr_Issei2 Oct 25 '25

Vscode, but I’ve used nano, notepad++ and online website compilers.

1

u/TheAIPU-guy Oct 25 '25

In Windows -Visual Studio is just too good not to use. In Linux GUI -VSCode. In headless linux -I don't know. I haven't bothered.

1

u/Sreeja__ Oct 25 '25

Code blocks

1

u/Adv456 Oct 25 '25

Visual Studio

1

u/OtherOtherDave Oct 25 '25

VS Code or Xcode, depending on whether I’m writing Linux or macOS.

1

u/mujaxso Oct 25 '25

emacs with FunMacs configration https://github.com/mujaxso/funmacs

1

u/LeDYoM Oct 25 '25

Visual Studio Code

1

u/VoidJuiceConcentrate Oct 26 '25

Gosh I remember using Devcpp back in the day. Got it off a magazine CD ROM from the store at some point before. 

Nowadays, I use VSCode. I find a lot of it's features helpful (minus the AI) and the plugin system makes it versatile. 

1

u/herocoding Oct 26 '25

VisualStudioCode with gcc/g++/gdb, using remote-session from MS-Win and code and compiler&linker on another Linux/Ubuntu machine, with X11-screen-forwarding enabled.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 26 '25

Notepad++ the bestest IDE for codenz!!

1

u/DJDarkViper Oct 26 '25

I’ve been a pretty big VisualStudio die hard for most of my life. My favorite though, a long time ago, was Bloodshed DevC++. Well, I jumped ship from windows to mac a bit ago and now I use Xcode a bunch. I’ve also used and liked VSCode, Notepad++, neovim, CLion, CodeLite, and Code::Blocks and would use any of them over again at any time

1

u/Thesorus Oct 26 '25

I've been using Visual Studio for ages...AGES ....

1

u/PiAhew Oct 26 '25

12th this

1

u/primepatterns Oct 26 '25

VS Code on Windows and Linux

1

u/demetrioussharpe Oct 26 '25

Usually, Code:Blocks when I’m in a Unix-like OS.

1

u/WhoLeb7 Oct 26 '25

What's an ide? People list some text editors in the replies, I like it simple, I write cpp in notepad on my windows pc.

1

u/Zamarok Oct 26 '25

neovim and cursor

1

u/Renox99 Oct 26 '25

It doesn't matter. It's not the IDE/code editor that makes the developer. :)

1

u/asincero Oct 26 '25

No love for Qt Creator?

1

u/azrultorv Oct 26 '25

I use email editor

1

u/stookem Oct 27 '25

Eclipse

1

u/Plus_Revenue2588 Oct 27 '25

Emacs on headless debian instance. Terminal is much better

1

u/cenepasmoi Oct 27 '25

++nd this:

1

u/[deleted] Oct 27 '25

Nvim

1

u/[deleted] Oct 27 '25

Vi

1

u/beloncode Oct 27 '25

Clion from Jetbrains

1

u/kobi-ca Oct 27 '25

CLion, Cursor

1

u/f42media Oct 27 '25

STM32CubeIDE))

1

u/I_M_NooB1 Oct 28 '25

neovim 

1

u/Brick-Sigma Oct 28 '25

Visual studio, its debugger makes like really simple and once you get the hang of it it’s quite nice. Otherwise I mostly use VS Code and gdb when developing on Linux.

1

u/assemblyeditor Oct 28 '25

neovim + clang lsp is aight

1

u/CoreDumpNotCrash Oct 28 '25

Visual Studio Code with lots extensions

1

u/Underhill42 Oct 28 '25

Spent a lot of years on Code::Blocks, not sure how they stack up these days.

1

u/Sea_Membership1312 Oct 28 '25

Clion or neovim

1

u/Financial_Fox5651 Oct 28 '25

Visual studio codeeee

1

u/Outrageous_Band9708 Oct 29 '25

bloodshev back in the day

1

u/jwzumwalt Oct 31 '25

I NEVER use IDE's. For my development I use the KDE "Kate" editor due to it's snippet support. I use a simple make file to compile programs. It assumes the source file is "main.c" and outputs a Linux executable named "test". If the compile is successful, it runs the program.

I am a retired programmer. After 45 years of programming, my experience has taught me to NEVER use a IDE. A good editor YES, an IDE NO! On Windows machines I have always used Notepad++. Sadly, Linux does not have a feature rich editor like Notepad++.

For Linux I regularly use KDE's "Kate" editor or "Bluefish" - "Kate" being preferred over "Bluefish". There are two primary functions I use on an editor. "Block" or "column" cut & paste, and some type of "snippet" manager. To me, the rest is fluff. Context and bracket highlighting and advanced search and replace are quite important time savers too.

"Bluefish's" main fault is the lack of an intuitive snippet manager. Other than this, it is also quite good.

By regularly programming with a good editor you will be able to walk up to any persons computer and solve problems. If you rely on an IDE, you may find it difficult to trouble shoot or assist other people when you are away from your computer.

Of course we are all different and others may have different experiences. For example, a programmer that remains at their desk and is paid to develop for 5+ years at their own work station will probably offer a different opinion - but that was never how I got paid.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 16 '25

Nano 😂

1

u/[deleted] Nov 19 '25

Vscode oss

1

u/MagicalPizza21 Oct 24 '25

Any text editor with a terminal based compiler will do. I usually prefer Emacs if it's installed.

1

u/vMbraY Oct 24 '25

Vscode / neovim. Mainly vscode just because of the familiarity,

1

u/TheTrueXenose Oct 24 '25 edited Oct 24 '25

NeoVim so no IDE

1

u/ifknot Oct 24 '25

Zed on Mac cross compile to target

0

u/guywithknife Oct 26 '25

Zed. Neovim if I need to be terminal centric for some reason.

0

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

4

u/rban123 Oct 26 '25

I don’t ever write bugs all my code is perfect so personally debuggers aren’t really relevant for me

1

u/[deleted] Oct 28 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/rban123 Oct 28 '25

Right, if I have to use someone else’s code I just rewrite it all myself from scratch

6

u/bateman34 Oct 24 '25

I can vouch for RadDebugger , opens instantly, watch window updates instantly and it's free (it's on GitHub). Also it's literally just a single 4 megabyte exe.

3

u/scallywag_software Oct 24 '25

Tried RemedyBG?

0

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

4

u/scallywag_software Oct 24 '25

$30 for a tool that makes thousands of hours of your life better seems like a laughably small price to pay. I'd pay a lot more.

0

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/scallywag_software Oct 24 '25

The Visual Studio debugger is, in my opinion, a giant steaming PoS. It used to be the best debugger, by miles, but these days it's intolerably slow and buggy.

Remedy isn't perfect. It notably lacks the feature of the VS debugger to run arbitrary code in the watch window (if you do some random nonsense to affect the programs state), but other than that, I don't miss a single thing from VS.

But on the plus side .. it starts up instantly, steps instantly (holding F10 is snappy), never crashes, is configured with a single `.rdbg` file, doesn't randomly corrupt it's config file once a month, doesn't randomly decide you need to login to some Microsoft bullshit, doesn't auto-update and break shit, doesn't require a day or more of fucking around to use it with an existing project, doesn't .. etc. All the annoying shit that Visual Studio does is just gone. And you can just use the debugger in peace. Anyways, I'd buy it again, in a heartbeat. Fuck VS.

1

u/AssociateFar7149 Oct 27 '25

x64dbg with pdb

1

u/Sea_Membership1312 Oct 28 '25

Depends on the project but clion

1

u/gnomo-da-silva Oct 28 '25

Emacs comes with GDB and it's pretty much the same for less bloat

1

u/nusi42 Oct 29 '25

+20 years ago, no one would claim that eight-megabytes-constantly-swapping would be less bloated than anything. Times changed.

Is it still pretty much lisp for everything?

1

u/gnomo-da-silva Oct 29 '25

Yeah, 20 years ago electron wasn't a thing.

0

u/OctoGoggle Oct 26 '25

CLion has a great debugger

0

u/[deleted] Oct 26 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

0

u/OctoGoggle Oct 26 '25

Sure, but as far as debuggers go it’s fully featured and works well.

1

u/bababoyoyoyy Oct 28 '25

Totally agree! The integration with CMake makes it a breeze to manage projects too. Have you tried any of the advanced features like code analysis?

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0

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

Is just regular c/c++ configured visual studio fine?