While it can be an avenue for procrastination, searching for a proper development environment often pays off with greatly improved productivity in the long term. I had some finicky requirements. I wanted to maintain my own CMakeLists file so that the project was IDE/editor/platform independent. I wanted to be able to just add files to the project from anywhere from VI, by OS copy, by git pull (I set wildcards in the CMakeLists.txt file) and definitely not have to fiddle in the IDE to add files. I wanted to edit markdown files which I was using for documentation, and placing in a separate docs folder. I wanted to see a decent preview of the markdown occassionally. Ideally, my environment would simply track my directory organization, including non C++ files. However, I also wanted intelligent code completion, including for my own code.
At work, where a ton of my current stuff is in python, I happily use Pycharm which has been a very worthwhile investment. So CLion was a natural candidate to start with. I didn’t get very far, because I balked at the license terms. It felt a little annoying to have to apply for an open source license and then renew every year and so on. When I want to play with red-tape I talk to the government.
I completely understand needing to charge people for your software. It’s a necessity for maintenance and continued development. But you can not get money from people who have none. To me the rational model is to charge professional entities for the software, to make it free to use for non-professional use and just not bother with the small fry. Basically, have a smallish legal department that goes after a big player if they violate. For companies and individual professionals a software license is the least of their costs (and probably the item with the highest ROI), and they will gladly pay to have some one to go to for support. Chasing down individual hobbyists just doesn’t make sense. I’m sorry, where did that soapbox come from? I must have stepped on it by accident. Moving on to the next editor/IDE …
I tried XCode next. It was a medium-ish install, and I think I needed an iTunes account. I was encouraged to use it because CMake can generate XCode projects and many coders working on Macs swore by it. I have used it infrequently mostly when I was editing a largish Objective C project during my postdoc. I found it fine to use and debug with. It was fine, but I disliked how CMake organized the XCode project virtual directories, and I disliked how I had to manually add non-source and new files. And memories of the over complicated build system started to come back to me.
I then found something called CodeLite. It was confusing because I spent some time trying to figure out ifit was related to Code::Blocks. CodeLite looked kind of promising. There was a nice tutorial on how to integrate with CMake based projects. But it looked cumbersome, and I had to add files to the project through the interface. By now, I was willing to endure this but I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no preview for Markdown. I liked that they limited the number of plugins, but I really wanted markdown preview. I told you I was finicky.
Then, quite by accident I started to poke around Visual Studio Code and downloaded it to try it out. In brief, it seems to satisfy all my finicky requirements.This choice rather surprised me, because it was just not on my radar. I also realize this does nothing to advance my attempt to get into the cool kids programming club where people use vim or emacs, but that was a lost cause anyway. (I now recall that I initially avoided VSC because a colleague spoke out very strongly against it a few months ago. Goes to show, you need to try things out for yourself)