Lightweight Development IDE (C++ specific, if possible)
 

Does anybody here know of any good, yet lightweight C++ IDE's for Linux? I'm looking for something that I can use to whip up some code quickly, compile and execute it, and have it organized as well. A few features such as Syntax highlighting and possibly . completetion are important, but huge project support with class listings, CVS support, and all of that is unneeded. Anyone know an IDE that fits this profile?

Depends what you want to do, I guess?

I use vi/vim (for editing the source files), g++ to compile and cvs or subversion for the versioning.

If you want something easy-to-use, use the KDevelop suite (the one that comes with KDE 3.2 is very complete) and use only the stuff that you need.
It's very easy to get started with IMHO. Automated install, plenty of docs, lots of wizards and project templates,...

Assuming you come from a Windows OS : you didn't use all the features of Visual C++ either, did you?

HTH.

This is a correct assumption, but what I liked about MSVC++ is that I could whip up just a test source-file very quickly, have syntax highlighting and . completion but not feel overburdened by too many features. Yet when I wanted to use the features it had, they were still there. KDevelop doesn't feel this way for some reason, and not to mention the awful load times, even on my AMD 2500+ with a Gig of RAM it can take up to 15 seconds to load. And I even compiled everything (including X and Gnome) from source with optimizations.

Anjuta is probably lighter than KDevelop. Interesting that it's so slow for you, it shouldn't. Which version do you have?

I agree that it's strange, it seems for me that a lot of linux software runs slower than their Windows counterparts. In theory, they should run significantly faster, everything was compiled from source with optimizations for my processor. I have KDevelop 3.2.3.

I suggest vim, or gvim/kvim for a graphical point-and-click extension to it. It supports syntax highlighting even for a lot of obscure file formats as well as pretty much all major ones and it is a full-blown IDE. There are a lot of useful plugin scripts (as well as color schemes) you can grab from the website. You can compile using the compiler of your choice from inside the editor and jump between lines that have caused errors during the compilation attempt...and the list is virtually endless. It may be a bit awkward at first but trust me, it's really worth it. I use gvim as my text/code editor in Windows as well.


Håkan

I have just what you need, it's called 'Anjuta', it's a fully featured IDE.
Well, there's nothing more to say:
http://anjuta.sourceforge.net/

Hope this helps.

I appreciate all of the responses, I am familiar with both vim and Anjuta. Anjuta I found to be a little slow as well. I think I'm going to give vim another chance however. It was awkward when I tried it, and I only know few of the commands. (such as I to get into "insert mode"), do you suggest any particular guide for getting familar with vim, or is it kind of a try and see what you get experience?

Vim comes with a little tutorial script called vimtutor. Just launch it from the commandline and you will get a little primer on how things work. Quite to the contrary of the opinions of most "real" vimmers I prefer using the arrow keys for moving around, but nevertheless it's a useful tutorial.

There is also a project called Cream, which is aimed at making vim more accessible and flatten the learning curve a bit - to make it less awkward if you will. I haven't used it myself but I have heard lots of good things about it.


Håkan

Ninwa, you wrote Anjuta i also slow for you. Does it mean that your system works slowly in general?

This is not the case, for example applicatiosn such as Gaim, XChat, Firefox, Dia, Quake3, Modevelop, and Evolution all load literally the second I click on the launcher. I note that Anjuta and KDE both start up a few seconds quicker the second time, but both take about 7 seconds even then. Maybe I'm just expecting too much.

In a discussion about "Why do they still compile for i386", A linux-guru-friend told me that playing with optimisation flags without knowing exactly what you are doing, can have the opposite effect and slow down the application significantly.

I'm not saying that you don't know what you're doing, but you might try to recompile with other settings.

I use KDevelop on a 3GHz machine with 1Gb RAM (and a slow harddrive) and that works very well (KDevelop takes about 6 seconds to start (no open project) first time, then about 4 seconds). I installed it with an upgrade to KDE 3.2 using apt.
I bet that my machine at home (3GHz with 512Mb RAM but an SATA RAID set of harddisks) will do better.

As for the starting time of applications, you can't really compare to Windows, because Windows starts a lot of stuff in the background without your knowledge, so that it seems that applications start faster. The price for this is that you lose resources when you're NOT using that application. (At least this is the case for Office and Internet Explorer)
(Got this from another discussion on startup time for Open Office and Mozilla)

HTH.