I've been using the Arduino IDE for a long time and I've been frustrated that it lacks so many things that other IDEs lack:
Code completion! (like with tab!)
Marking incorrect syntax before compiling
A decent debugger! >:(
... and many other things
It's so annoying returning to the Arduino IDE coming from quite literally any other one. I forget common syntax too often without things like code completion and make silly mistakes only to discover them after compiling...
Are others frustrated by this? Do alot of Arduino users use other IDEs? I have heard Arduino is working on a new version with a debugger... Let me know if I'm the only one that feels this way...
This is available in the beta version of the Arduino IDE:
The Arduino Pro IDE also has it:
dgorbunov:
A decent debugger! >:(
The Arduino Pro IDE has hardware debugging support now. Currently, the Arduino SAMD Boards platform is the only one that has the necessary updates to use this feature, but the infrastructure put in place in the Arduino Pro IDE is in no way specific to Arduino SAMD Boards, so support can be added to other platforms.
dgorbunov:
Seems like it's only in alpha for the web version right now
It's not in the Arduino Web Editor, and I haven't heard any announcements about plans to add it to the web editor. It's in the Arduino Pro IDE.
Frustrated not. But i looked into the option of using codeblocks, since i was so happy with that before. Somehow the complications of getting it to work + lack of support for it, made me drop the issue. I just sort of got used to it's quirks. You know there is interpreters & compilers and both have disadvantages, and Java is both an interpreter and a compiler. That is what the IDE has been written in. Which makes it very portable.
Auto-complete functions i usually don't want, but marking syntax errors before compile would be nice.
Still if i think of how i first started programming, using a ZX81, i think it is quite a big step forward.
dgorbunov:
It's so annoying returning to the Arduino IDE coming from quite literally any other one.
As I understand it the Arduino IDE was created to make programming easy for people who have no idea about the existence of the features you miss.
If you are familiar with other development systems why bother with the Arduino IDE?
I use the Geany editor for all my programming. I have written a simple Python program to compile and upload Arduino code using the command-line IDE. It can be used without Geany.
