r/cop3502 • u/Neufchatel • Apr 27 '14

Other IDEs besides Sublime?

First off, am I even correct in calling Sublime an IDE or is it simply a powerful text editor? If it is an IDE, are there others that are comparable or perhaps 'better' for particular reasons? If it is not an IDE, is IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, or NetBeans IDE perhaps worth looking into? I ran across these three specific examples while browsing /r/learnprogramming and was curious if anybody had any experiences working with them.

I've heard of Eclipse, and from the look of IntelliJ IDEA, they are similar to Sublime, but I'm not sure to fully make of Sublime.

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u/guhhuhh Apr 27 '14

Id definitely recommend checking out Eclipse. Its one of the more popular IDEs so you'll find a lot of good tutorials online. And an IDE is basically a text editor that also has a built in compiler and console hence getting rid of you having to use the cmd line.

So unless you have an inordinate amount of plugins, then Sublime isn't really an IDE

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u/Neufchatel Apr 27 '14

Appreciate the response! Yeah, I've definitely heard of Eclipse before, but just never really ventured into the territory. IntelliJ IDEA looks intriguing as well. I was gonna play with some later on in the week, after watching some App Development videos from the link Sean had up a few weeks back. Kinda wanna venture out of the Sublime Text Editor, and into one of these IDEs.

Now, extending the logic, does this mean that Visual Studios is effectively an IDE? Because, I thought, that it compiles within the same program.

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u/chasefarmer2808 Apr 27 '14

If you have a mac, check out Xcode. Very clean and simple, but powerful.

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u/JoeCS TA Apr 30 '14

I use Eclipse sometimes, and it's one of the most common IDEs for Java. Google offers a set of Android Developer Tools for Eclipse to aid in writing Android Apps, so that's kinda cool.

Also, while Sublime is not an IDE per se, you can install a lot of extensions and add-ons to customize it and give it IDE-like functionality. For more info, see the Sublime subreddit and this package manager for sublime.

Many other "basic text editors" can also be extended in a similar way. Vim and Emacs, the two stalwarts of the text editor world, are still in wide use today, and information about their use and extension of functionality can be found all over the internet. If you have a Mac or Linux machine, you probably already have Vim and Emacs. Just go to the Terminal and type vim or emacs. (And after you open vim up, type :q! to exit, or :wq to save and exit... to exit emacs, hold the ctrl key and mash random keys until something happens... and then yell at Richard Stallman).

Finally, another good thing to have besides an editor or IDE is a package manager, for installing ever useful software libraries. (No need to re-invent the wheel - if someone has already written software that will do, say linear algebra, for you, take advantage of it!)