Suggestions for C Language IDE?

Question

Which IDE you use or have used for C programming? Which one you like the most and why?

/﹋\

(҂`_´)

<,︻╦╤─ ҉ c c c c c c c c c c c c c ▬▬▬.◙.▬▬▬

/﹋\ ═▂▄▄▓▄▄▂

◢◤ █▀▀████▄▄▄▄◢◤

█▄ █ █▄ ███▀▀▀▀▀▀▀╬

◥█████◤

══╩══╩═

Update ------

Spent a lot of time on eclipse but wasn't able to get it in working mode, Tried Visual studio again and it worked just needed a little bit of tinkering. it worked but output .exe false detected by Bitdefender antivirus and got quarantined automatically. Added folder to exceptions. Hmmm, may be VS not that bad ! Lets c how it goes.
Will definitely keep working on eclipse, will learn things doing so.

I'll keep on updating !!
Thank you all

p.s- This discussion isn't over yet, all suggestions are most welcome.

Message was edited by: mudz

Update 2 ------

Interestingly I did something, and it worked. So, eclipse is working as well for now. I've no idea. Cygwin64 to mingw.. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Message was edited by: mudz

Jan Cumps · Accepted Answer

Typically, I use Eclipse and derivates, and sometimes Visual Studio. I've been a C++ developer for part of my career, and that was on the Microsoft toolchain with Visual Studio. I liked it then and I still like it now. I have VS 2019 Community installed. But mostly I use Eclipse or several vendor's rebrand of it. With GCC toolchains. I like that combination too. Arduino IDE: when working with an Arduino, most for prototyping. I don't like it but the examples and libraries are often excellent. Others that I used but haven't kept using: NetBeans: I like it a lot for Java programming, but for C I prefer the first two I mentioned. Code Blocks: it has a fanatic following. I think it's good and faster than Eclipse. Energia: used a few times with TI boards. Just for testing. I use their Eclipse offspring CCS usually.

shabaz · Answer

Exactly as Fred and Jan say.. for coding for Windows targets, why not use Visual Studio, it is already tightly integrated and ready to use, plus there will be plenty of examples online. It's not 'too complex' - just takes a bit of effort to find a tutorial that you're comfortable with. There's thousands of books on Windows programming, they almost all use Visual Studio.

If you're just beginning to learn C without making use of any Windows libraries and perhaps just standard input/output to the terminal, then is an IDE needed? People write programs (even huge ones) without an IDE too. They just use the code editor of their choice, and do the build using scripts. You'll need to learn how to use makefiles anyway, what better way than to learn to do it for a simple C program.

Sean_Miller · Answer

Just wrote about my latest favorite semi-colon language for PC to learn programming:

Hidden Gem: The "Processing IDE" for... | element14 | Arduino Projects

Not exactly C, but very similar and translates to microcontrollers well down the road.

-Sean

dougw · Answer

I have used a few, but the one I like the most, by far, is PSoC Creator by Cypress Semiconductor. It integrates hardware and software development extremely well and reduces development time greatly by automatically bringing in appropriate pre-written APIs depending on how the hardware is configured. Most of the code is written for you and hardware configuration is more comprehensive than other IDEs.

mudz · Answer

Thank you for your suggestions I've installed eclipse and vs both and will be using for first time for programming. Tried eclipse first, wrote simple program to print a line and it gave me an error. So switched to vs. VS, Too complex to use right now for me. So many things to choose from and didn't get what I wanted in quick write build method. So will give another try tomorrow. Eclipse - I can say its easy. I'm confident it will be much easy to use than VS. For hardware programming I've use keil, ccs, before. Loved CCS while programming Ti micro-controllers. Keil is too simple and easy to use, made my 8051 experience pleasant. p.s- Its too late now here almost 3:00 am morning. Will try things tomorrow.

jomoenginer · Answer

What OS are you working with?

On Linux, for just simple C development, either vi or vim. With vim you can add features where you can do syntax highlighting and such.

For IDE specific, Eclipse would be the first one.

Code::Blocks is another one which is cross platform: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Raspberry Pi.

Visual Studio Code as an Editor with compile done via command line but working on using it as a compiler.

Atom is another simple editor.

Windows: Eclipse, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code pretty much in that order.

Jan Cumps · Answer

mudz wrote: Alright, actually I'm sorry I was not clear enough before. I was asking suggestions for simple c programming not for hardware based programming. like Turbo C which I used long long time ago to first learn c programming... I was trying to re learn it, so what tool is best nowadays to relearn c programming? For a free-of-charge easy start on a windows machine, I can suggest Visual Studio Community, with the "workload" Desktop Development with C++ (an install option). That gives you a C / C++ compiler with fairly good compliance and support for recent additions. And you have all in 1. Possibly (as you'd expect) you'll find other and better proposals in the comments here soon...

Jan Cumps · Answer

mudz wrote:
...

Try out C++20 Preview: set up a development environment

If you think you've set up your toolchain correctly already at the moment, try this: Project -> Properties -> C / C++ Build -> Builder Type -> Internal Builder.

koudelad · Answer

I could recommend Atom and Visual Studio Code as free and CLion as a paid, full-featured IDE.

BigG · Answer

I am going to suggest Segger Embedded Studio . Oddly this is one IDE I know the least about and yet I have found it to be one of the better ones to use. The reason I got to use it was through a Taiyo Yuden BLE module and a Panasonic BLE module road test. It just does the job and so I find myself going back to it.

michaelkellett · Answer

You might like Pelles C, smorgasbordet - Pelles C Much smaller and more plain simple C than most. ABout as near to Turbo C as you 'll get on a modern PC. And free. MK

mrmnt63 · Answer

Sololearn.com is a helpful re-introduction to get you back into the swing. It has many languages and is a great introduction if you want to try to learn something from scratch as well. It has quizzes and examples. Allows for saving code you write and allows you to modify and play around with the example code it provides. It is set up so you can do a few minutes at a time and pick-up where you left off. It covers all the important stuff at a minimal level of depth. It is an easy starting point.

mrmnt63 · Answer

As a free simple editor, I like Notepad++. It supports many languages in one place with highlighting and syntax help.