Looking for light-weight multi-platform IDE

Question

I've been recently scouring the internet for an IDE to use on some hobby projects. I use VS at one of my jobs and Emacs on the other. I'm looking for something multi-platform and more light-weight than stuff like Eclipse.

Most of the work I do is in C/C++, Python and Lua.

I've looked into Code::Blocks and it seemed to have exactly what I wanted. It's got code completion, supports custom makefiles easily, a visual debugger, but unfortunately it seems to have bad support for darker themes which is a must for me.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I'm not sure I'd call it "lightweight" but Eclipse will do all of that.

Answer 2

TextMate (for Mac) and its Windows counterpart e - TextEditor are great text editors that support syntax highlighting for almost every language ever and they have great theme support. They are not full featured IDEs, but they do have some form of code completion called snippets that are very useful once you learn them. Again, because they are not IDEs, they don't have debugging support (that I know of), but they might fit the rest of your needs well enough to be useful.

Answer 3

If can get used to command line style editing and quick keyboard shortcuts VIM is a good alternative. It runs on many *NIX, Windows and other platforms. Its an editor, not an IDE.

I doubt if any real multi-platform IDE's exist with decent debugging support; with the exception of Eclipse+plugins and its not lightweight. But on modern systems with 2GB+ RAM, I'd would hardly call Eclipse a resource hog.

Answer 4

Could you expand on what you mean by "dark themes" or atleast give an example.

If you're refering to dark background and light/coloured text, it is possible to change all the colours under Editor > Syntax Highlighting settings.

Cheers

thing2k

Answer 5

One that has many features of the professional IDE's is Komodo IDE. If you want a stripped down version there is also "Komodo Edit.

I personally just use whatever syntax highlighting program is available.

The program I used on Windows is Crimson Editor, which has apparently gone open source since I last used it. Apparently there is also another editor derived from it called Emerald Editor, which I know I'm going to look at after writing this post.

Answer 6

I think I've found something that fulfills all my requirements with CodeLite. I haven't had the change to use it very extensively but it's spec sheet seems to match everything I needed.