what's the best stable editor & compiler for c++ with gui & under linux? [closed]

Question

What's the best stable (editor & compiler) for C++ with gui that works under linux?

Note: Explicitly not looking for a full IDE.

Answer 1

I like to code with Emacs. It has a nice gui also for gdb. I recently made a snapshot while i worked on some code snippet (see below, it doesn't look like 1980 at all :).

That said, there are a lot of other fine IDEs. I like Eclipse for Java development, and heard it has a nice C++ plugin too (CDT). Netbeans also works for C++ since recently. KDevelop, an IDE for KDE supporting many languages, is currently being rewritten for KDE4: KDevelop Blog. Looks promising. Then there are some others where i cannot tell you how they are since i've not tested them, including Anjuta (for the Gnome desktop) and Code::Blocks (written with wxWidgets it's quite cross-platform). If all you want is a GUI for the compiler and a symbol browser, you could also use geany, which is very fast and includes an embedded terminal like KDevelop.

All of these have their ups and downs. Best try each out and then decide. From the stability point of view, i've found Emacs is very stable and never crashes, Eclipse is also very mature. Netbeans gets the third place. It sometimes hangs but overall it's also quite mature. KDevelop likes(ed) to crash from time to time, but big progress was made in this regard. Especially version 3.5 did make a big step forward and felt more mature than any version before.

Emacs editing some code:

Emacs debug session:

Answer 2

Staying on the realm of the free stuff, probably Eclipse with its C++ plugin, otherwise I code using g++ + gdb + make + gvim + other gnu stuff. The results are awesome, but the learning curve is severe.

Depending on what are you coding, there's Qt designer and KDevelop, too, but I haven't used them.

ADDED: Reading back your original question, you seem to want something (a list of programs) that's not yet an IDE, though it offers a GUI. I don't remember any GUIs for gcc, but gdb did have a GUI called DDD. So you'll have to use the console at least some of the time.