this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
96 points (94.4% liked)

Programming

20363 readers
114 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I use vscode for my personal projects (c++ and a fully open source stack, compiling for both Linux and Windows).

I'm using the proprietary version of vscode (via the aur) for the plugin repository, but I've always envied the open source version...

Are there any tools that have made you excited?

Bonus points if they have some support for compiling with MSVC (or if you can convince me to ditch it for something else).

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Notepad++, all i do is edit java class files.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Zed is delightful to work with, highly recommend it. It is very customizable, and debugger support is coming soon. It's like neovim but I don't have to spend 15% of my time maintaining it...

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Neovim

I tried using VSCode because of the copilot integration, but frankly copilot is underwhelming for me. I gave “vibe coding” a shot on a personal project and the results were slower than just doing it myself.

I’m back to neovim. I’m very productive in customizing it and can never go back.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There's avante.nvim for LLM integration, it supports most if not all LLM vendors at the moment.

I tried it, however, and got to the same conclusion as you. Not worth it.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Just wanted to throw Kate into the mix of suggestions…

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I use helix editor in the terminal (Technically not an IDE but neither is VSCode). Works great for a keyboard and terminal-centric workflow. I had to configure it a bit to get it where I want but after that I had a blast to write Rust projects in.

It does get a lot of getting used to if you're not used to vim-like keybinds, and does take memorizing shortcuts

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Helix is awesome. I've spent many hours these passed months configuring both Sway and Helix to my liking, and it has become joyous to use them together. I prefer Helix's default configs to vim's. Still got to use Vim motions a lot though, in Obsidian etc. Similar in many aspects, but there are many small things Helix does which I find more logical. u for undo and U for redo. Small things.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I use Code OSS with clangd and the nvim extension (because Microsoft disabled their c/c++ tools) because i want access to the nrfconnect extension pack as a beginner. I don't have to go searching in the documentation and compiling, then recompiling 10 times to self-discover the required devicetree parameters and figure out what drivers are available vs mainline zephyr.

Plus the debug interface works well.

For everything else possible it is vim/neovim, but I haven't been able to find good neovim setup for nrfconnect.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

I started using Helix editor a while back, and it hasn't disappointed yet. One important thing I've not yet got to work is Python debugging, so for that I usually switch over to VSCode or PyCharm. Otherwise a very good editor.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

I like vscodium. Basically the same as vscode but without MS stuff. (but that also means a few extensions are gone, like the c/c++ extension and intellicode)

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I'm paying for the All Products Pack by Jetbrains, use them pretty much exclusively.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

I've been using neovim for years (and the vim family for decades), and I guess with LSP it's pretty much an IDE these days.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Microsoft just released Edit a couple of days ago. At least it's not bloated, and it's cross-platform.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Edit

That is bloat!

Just look at the number of files required to build it. Just for a text editor!

A single Makefile and a source file should be enough!

Just use ed man!

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

My preference is Visual Studio. For some technologies, and mass-text-replace, I use Visual Studio Code.

A long time ago my main IDE was Eclipse for C++ and Java before that. Recently, I've tried RustRover for Rust as an alternative to VS Code.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I love Eclipse for Java and QtCreator for C++/Qt. Eclipses auto-complete switched between psychic and psychotic at times but its integration with tools such as git and gradle is second to none. I never drunk the Jetbrains koolaid.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA for Java programming, emacs for everything else.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago

Lazy Vim is super underrated imo

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

I love kdevelop

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Vim for most things. Vscode for js things. Jetbrains for specific stacks like all Python or such. VS for .net.

IDEs sure come and go, buy I seem to always go back to vim after a while.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Emacs!

With LSPs it works for just about anything and Magit is simply too good.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Emacs with LSP and magit rules!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Magit has changed the workflow of my life.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Neither of these are IDEs (nor is VSCode), but it'd be Zed and Neovim for me. Zed is fast and pleasant to use, but also will enshittify eventually. Debug support is in progress but not live. Neovim is fun and it's nice to be more in control of what is going on, but I haven't made the necessary progress to be productive in large projects with it yet. I was excited for Lapce but it fell short, had too many issues in a short time.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

I am currently learning Java so my favorite IDE is Intellij IDEA :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Jetbrains Rider for C# and VSCodium for arduino / microcontroller programming.

I’m trying to learn my way around the tmux + neovim life but the learning curve might be too much for me.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

Zed is definitely my go-to these days. Used to have vscode but the sluggishness just became too much for me. Zed does what vscode did right but faster.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

VSCodium, with vim mode enabled. Came from neovim which still is the fastest experience ever but I had plugins break too frequently after an update. Besides vscode has some nice features (visual git tree for example) that neovim lacks.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Right now, the jetbrains IDEs are my favourite because they are proper IDEs, not some editor with a bunch of scripts in a trenchcoat pretending to be an editor. But the company is starting to lose touch with its customers: developers who want an IDE for productivity, not a VS Code lookalike. It's like the company is finally being taken over by managers who don't know lick about development and it's starting to show (at least to me).

Now, I'm on the market for a new editor and even willing to pay, even though I'd prefer paying for an open source IDE. Right now, Zed is looking interesting. The only thing that bothers me is how loud people were about it. Hype destroys my faith in stuff as it's often just good marketing. Another thing that bugged me is that when they started, they were "Mac first, Linux maybe". But now that the hype has died down, there's much less "omg, zed is the new editor and it will be better anything else" type posts, and it supposedly works on Linux, I can give it a try.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Same feeling about Jetbrains. I always upgraded to the latest Pycharm version until now. I actually downgraded from 2025 to 2024, because I don’t like the new UI.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Same. I'm thinking of cancelling my subscription and just sticking with what works. I'm not sure I had a really useful update in a while.

Anti Commercial-AI license

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

QtCreator is very nice as a C++ IDE. No, it doesn't force Qt on you in any way.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Qt Creator is my favorite IDE. I'm mostly worrking in C# these days and I so miss it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I've gone through Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Vim, Atom, Sublime, VSCode, probably others too, but frankly VSCode's simplicity out of the box coupled with great plugin support is hard to beat. Folks who complain about VSCode not having some feature like to ignore that being relatively simple by default is a good thing. You can always add or enable what extensions you need to tailor it to your language and workflow of choice. Even if you're used to Vim keyboard centric editing...guess what? There's a well supported OSS extension to give you that functionality.

The power of being able to use one IDE on a diverse team across various languages is huge. You can even commit extension and settings defaults to a repo to immediately get new cloners up to speed with whatever workflow and tooling defaults are good starting points on a per project basis, but still leaving them the option to ignore/override as needed without dictating a team-wide workflow change.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Currently I use Code OSS, which is less my favorite but it works.

Out of all the IDE's I've tried (vscode, webstorm, Code OSS, Kate, KDevelop), regular old Visual Studio 2022 is still my all time favorite, using it is such a smooth experience.

Its biggest flaw and why i had to switch is no linux support :(

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Vscode when I'm feeling productive, neovim when I'm feeling saucy

Hate pretty much every other ide out there, but do occasionally get forced into Android studio or xcode. Xcode is the worst, msvs a close second.

One day a multi cursor first multi-language extension lightweight ide will replace vscode I'm sure but it's solid for now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

I use jupyter notebooks on VSCode

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Rider for Unreal Engine at work. Neovim at work/home for literally everything else (web, golang, python, zig). I have vscodium as well, a glorified config file editor basically.

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›