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Ask HN: What Is The Best Free IDE?

2 points by tronium ↗ HN
What is the best free IDE out there? Preferably ones that have multi-platform (especially Ubuntu) support, as well as multi-language support.

10 comments

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hibikir
We'd do better if you told us which languages you plan to work on. For instance, IntelliJ Idea, community edition, is a pretty strong contender, but it's at its best in JVM languages.
zindlerb
my current favorite free IDE is lighttable.
jagawhowho
The combo of emacs, slime, ac-slime, paredit, redshank.
S4M
While I agree that emacs is great, the OP hasn't specified that he or she wanted to code in Lisp.

Thank you for mentioning redshank otherwise, it looks quite powerful.

hackerboos
Personally I'd only bother with an IDE for Java, Objective-C or C# - then I'd choose IntelliJ, Xcode and Visual Studio respectively.

I'd stick to a text editor otherwise.

ywu
Same here. And for the editor, I stick to Sublime Text.
LarryMade2
Check out Eclipse, its a great cross-platform IDE, some people don't like its speed as it is in Java, but it gets the job done.

Though YMMV depending on what you code in. Some IDEs are better suited for certain languages than others.

Best to start with a comparison page (link below) then google/ask questions once you get a list of what looks good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_integrated_develo...