Free Lightweight IDE/Text Editor for Windows - C++ Development

Question

I have searched a lot for the exact development tool that fits my requirements, but could not find it anywhere.

Here are my requirements:

1) Free.

2) Lightweight. (Eclipse is out).

3) Can handle a large project.

4) Input: Just the source tree, and possibly makefiles. No project/solution files.

5) Indexing - Auto Completion and "Go to Declaration/Definition". - Very Important. The only reason for not using Notepad++.

6) Good tabbed source editing with Highlighting with a nice GUI. No terminal editors for me.

I do not need any other features like Code compilation, Debugging, etc.

Used Notepad++ for the same project, but my requirement no. 5 is missing. It does have plugins, but they are a pain to use.

I am currently using kscope on Linux over VMWare, and I found it to be exactly the perfect tool that I need, but VMWare is too slow, and too heavy for my machine.

Can you suggest the perfect texteditor/IDE for me?

Thank You.

Answer 1

Scite is great. It's lightweight in the sense you mention, as is my main "IDE" in the past few years for developing Python, Perl, VHDL and sometimes even C code. It doesn't have intellisense, but can be easily scripted with Lua and external scripts in any language you choose.

Answer 2

Try Code::Blocks

Highlights:

* Open Source! GPLv3, no hidden costs.
* Cross-platform. Runs on Linux, Mac, Windows (uses wxWidgets).
* Written in C++. No interpreted languages or proprietary libs needed.
* Extensible through plugins

Compiler:

* Multiple compiler support:
      o GCC (MingW / GNU GCC)
      o MSVC++
      o Digital Mars
      o Borland C++ 5.5
      o Open Watcom
      o ...and more
* Very fast custom build system (no makefiles needed)
* Support for parallel builds (utilizing your CPU's extra cores)
* Multi-target projects
* Workspaces to combine multiple projects
* Inter-project dependencies inside workspace
* Imports MSVC projects and workspaces (NOTE: assembly code not supported yet)
* Imports Dev-C++ projects 

Debugger:

* Interfaces GNU GDB
* Also supports MS CDB (not fully featured)
* Full breakpoints support:
      o Code breakpoints
      o Data breakpoints (read, write and read/write)
      o Breakpoint conditions (break only when an expression is true)
      o Breakpoint ignore counts (break only after certain number of hits)
* Display local function symbols and arguments
* User-defined watches (support for watching user-defined types through scripting)
* Call stack
* Disassembly
* Custom memory dump
* Switch between threads
* View CPU registers

Interface:

* Syntax highlighting, customizable and extensible
* Code folding for C++ and XML files.
* Tabbed interface
* Code completion
* Class Browser
* Smart indent
* One-key swap between .h and .c/.cpp files
* Open files list for quick switching between files (optional)
* External customizable "Tools"
* To-do list management with different users