Top 10 IDEs For Programmers

IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a place where programmers can create their own applications by writing the code. Normally the IDEs come with debuggers and compilers, which makes the work of programmers much easier. It is a single software in which all parts of development are done. In earlier days the IDEs started with terminals and consoles, but later they have changed a lot due to user needs. Nowadays the IDEs are much more developed, they use machine learning to autocomplete our code and also provide suggestions while we are struck or face any issues.

So these are some of the most popular and efficient IDEs available in the market right now:

1. IntelliJ IDEA

It is written in Java and is one of the most user-friendly IDEs available for coding. It mainly aims at productivity and user experience. It gives relevant suggestions while you are coding. It has integrated version control systems and it supports many languages. It has smart code completion which suggests the names of classes and methods while we are coding. It does not require the use of any external plugins. Intellij IDEA easily supports a lot of developer tools. But the one among few disadvantages is that the performance is not up to the mark in low-end devices.

2. Visual Studio

It is an IDE from Microsoft and is used to develop websites, web apps, and mobile apps. It has a wide functioning which allows it to develop almost anything. It also supports IntelliSense coding for C++. It can be used in both Windows and MAC and allows us to create applications for any platform. It enables us to test apps and correct errors on the go. Visual Studio is available for free. Visual Studio comes with its own search engine which allows to search for the features of Visual Studio. The Team Foundation Server feature of Visual Studio is also very nice, it allows the user to have a checkpoint and roll back to the previous version. But the problem with Visual Studio is that it is a heavy software and takes a very long time to load.

3. Eclipse

It is developed by the Eclipse Foundation. It functions by having a base workspace and an extensible plugin environment where we can download and customize the workspace available. It supports debugging and profiling. It has a drag and drop functionality and allows us to analyze the code using static analysis. If you are comfortable in eclipse IDE, you can code in any famous language like Python, Java, and C++. The OS supports for this IDE are Windows, Linux, and macOS. Eclipse is available for free to use.

4. PyCharm

PyCharm is an IDE developed by JetBrains specifically for Python. It is best known for smart code completion, code inspections, on-the-fly error highlighting, and very quick fixes. It helps us to write neat and maintainable code. It also offers great support for using frameworks like Django, Flask, Google App Engine, etc. It integrates with the IPython Notebook and we can also use scientific packages like Numpy and Matplotlib. PyCharm IDE is free to use. The OS supports for this IDE are Windows, macOS, and Linux.

5. Atom

Atom is mainly used for web development. It is developed by GitHub. Atom is founded by GitHub’s founder Chris Wanstrath. It is a hundred percent free and open source. It is cross-platform and used for Windows, Linux, and macOS. It is highly customizable and has many useful plugins. The main advantage with Atom is that it has an attractive interface, good color-coded syntax. But the disadvantage is that it suffers from high start-up time.

6. Arduino IDE

Arduino is an IDE written in C and C++. It is mainly used to upload codes to Arduino boards. It supports almost all microcontroller development boards available in the market today. The code in Arduino is in the cloud so we can use it everywhere. Arduino IDE accepts C and C++ languages because most of the device’s libraries are written in C++. But most of the underlying system of the Arduino is not object-oriented so it uses both C and C++.

7. NetBeans

NetBeans is developed by Apache Software Foundation and Oracle. It is an IDE for Java. It allows applications to be developed from components called modules. It is owned by the company which owns Java, so the support for Java developers would be excellent here. Moreover, it is the official IDE for Java 8. It allows the users to build desktop, mobile, and web applications. The advantage of NetBeans is that the autocomplete feature is very much useful and running the server application is very simple in NetBeans, but the disadvantage is that it takes a lot of time to start.

8. AWS Cloud9

It is developed by Amazon. It is an online IDE. AWS Cloud9 supports various programming languages like C, C++, Python, JavaScript, etc. It is very easy to access AWS Cloud9 and collaborate. It allows us to run the development environment on a managed Amazon EC2 instance or other Linux servers available. In AWS Cloud9 we can also simulate the terminal with Linux commands, allowing parallel development for various developers. The disadvantage is that it is difficult to choose the instance for a project.

9. Code::Blocks

It is developed by the Code::Blocks team. Code::Blocks is written in C++. It is open-source software. Code::Blocks support many compilers like GCC and Visual C++. It is very extensible and configurable. It is one of the best IDE for C and C++. The GNU GCC compiler of Code::Blocks is very fast and highly scalable. Code::Blocks is very easy to use for beginners. Code::Blocks offer more flexibility and it is great as an open-source IDE. The disadvantage with Code::Blocks is that the design seems a bit dull.

10. Jupyter Notebook

Jupyter Notebook, not actually a full-fledged IDE, is an open-source web-based application. It is widely used in data science, scientific computing, and machine learning. It is widely used with Python but it supports other languages as well. It is also used as a presentation or educational tool. It also supports markdowns, so that we can add HTML components, audio, video, etc. It is founded by Fernando Perez and Brian Granger.