Where can one find a nice (free) ide for c++ development?

Any free IDE's out there for C++ like there is for netbeans for java?


Should I need to buy one, which one do you use/like?

Where can one find a nice (free) ide for c++ development?
Look at these.





Bloodshed Dev-C++:


http://www.bloodshed.net/dev/





Eclipse C/C++ Development Tooling - CDT:


http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/





NetBeans C/C++ (netbeans + addon):


http://www.netbeans.org/products/cpluspl...





Code::Blocks:


http://www.codeblocks.org/





Visual Studio C++ 2005 Express Edition:


http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/express...





Open Watcom:


http://www.openwatcom.org/
Reply:Microsoft has a free version of their Visual C++ IDE (called express or something to that effect). It's quite nice.
Reply:It depends on the OS you are using. If you're on Windows, the Visual Studio Express Edition is free for everyone.





Code::Blocks is supposed to be the leading cross-platform open-source C++ IDE out there and it's the IDE I was very excited about, but I personally think they still have too many bugs to resolve, and their support for Linux is lagging behind Windows (mostly because they get more feedback from Windows users). Besides, their "suggestion box", or whatever you want to call it (the window that pops up and displays a list of possible word matches for the characters you've typed) is very uninformative. Their interface has major flaws, and most of them are in the process of being fixed or, they're waiting for wxWidgets to fix them. Last I checked, they were in the process of moving from wxWidgets 2.6 to 2.8. You can try it and see if you like it.





Aside from Code::Blocks, if you want to code on Linux, KDevelop looks more and more attractive and I think that if you take the time to customize it, rearrange the interface, disable the non-working documentation items, clean up the extra toolbars, remove some of the unneeded tabs on the left, then you'll end up with a pretty good IDE, that actually lets you browse the project's folder and has multiple tabs. You should probably change the font too, and set the line numbers to show up by default. You can then customize your project and configure custom make's and etc. I still have to prove the previous sentence.





You could use Eclipse with CDT, but I'm reluctant to do that, and it proved to be very slow and ugly. Some people like it though.





For now, I'm just using VIM and make, but I'm occasionally coding in KWrite.





I can't say anything about Bloodshed Dev-CPP, except that I didn't like it as soon as I opened it. But don't take my word for it.





The bottom line is: they are all free, but when it comes to measuring the performance and the gains, few of them actually make it worth using. CodeBlocks might be one of them. I've had some issues with the free version of Visual C++ Express Edition, but I'm still using it on Windows, in hope the bugs will be fixed in the future.