Geany vs Eclipse for C development on large projects

Question

I'm trying to find an IDE for C that will give me the same level of comfort I got used to from programming in Java. I heard good things about Geany (from related questions here on Stack Overflow), and am familiar with Eclipse from my work with Java, and I was wondering which would be better suited for Linux development (kernel space stuff).

In particular I'm interested in an objective opinion of which one has a better (straightforward) integration with the terminal, and which one gets the closest to IDE features for OO languages like Java with the minimal amount of hassle. Any other relevant comparisons will be welcomed of course.

Answer 1

Use the Eclipse, Luke...

I supposed that I'd never give such advice, but Eclipse with CDT is a very good IDE, one of the most advanced. You should understand that Geany is only a text editor with some IDE features. And Eclipse is an IDE, yes - not so lightware like Geany, but it has lots of truly IDE features: refactoring, code analysis, error detection, and in-code hints. Also, it has easy integration with many popular profilers.

Simply try CDT - you'll like it.

Answer 2

The real question is: How much do you want your IDE to do for you? Eclipse will do much more than Geany, which can make you more productive, or can make it more fragile.

Eclipse will impose its own project structure, including putting metadata files in your directories. It will also require that it be able to successfully build your project(s) before many of its features will work, so you need to make sure that it can find all of your dependencies, etc. Basically, it may take more time & effort to get started. However, it has a ton of features.

Geany is much less intrusive, much faster startup, with excellent text-editing abilities - perhaps better text-editing than Eclipse - but a more modest set of programming tools. It works well when you want your builds to be external, eg launching 'make' or Maven.

I use Eclipse for launching automated tests, and for interactions with SVN (Geany has a plugin for Version Control integration, but it's limited & seems to be buggy). For most things, I prefer Geany.

Answer 3

I personally like Geany because it is so lightweight. But as Evgeny points out it is not a fully fledged IDE. Its built in terminal is a standard Linux shell (sh, no fancy bash here). If you don't need all the advanced features of Eclipse, Geany might be possible alternative, but if not, go with Eclipse.