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271

answers:

6
+2  Q: 

Best Fortran IDE

Hi all,

Is there anybody use Fortran on stackoverflow? What IDE do you use and which one do you think to be the best. Seems lots of people surround me are quite inconvenient with Intel Visual Fortran. Because there is no support for intellisense, refactoring, etc.

Thanks a lot in advance!

+1  A: 

What about these ones:

Photran - An Integrated Development Environment and Refactoring Tool for Fortran (this one is everything you need :D)

Oracle Solaris Studio Advanced C, C++ and Fortran development platform

Leniel Macaferi
Thanks, look cool. But it only runs on Solaris/Linux. While lots of people use Fortran aside with other applications only runs on Windows.
Roy
No... Photran runs on Windows.
Leniel Macaferi
Yes, Photran! Seems the best for now. Let's see what IDEs other people use most. :D
Roy
How to install Photran: http://wiki.eclipse.org/PTP/photran/documentation/photran6#Installing_Photran
Leniel Macaferi
Tried Photran. It's running on Cygwin or MinGW. Not so convenient. :(
Roy
A: 

Many Fortran developers use text editors plus some build automation tool like CMake or SCons. Partially because of lack of well-featured IDE.

However there are some projects. I've tried Photran, Fortran IDE for Eclipse. It has limited support for autocomplete and refactoring.

Also take a look at Code::Blocks IDE for Fortran. I do not like Code::Blocks...

kemiisto
A: 

We use an in-house extension to visual studio to get code completion for our fortran code and to assist us with debugging. But even so there is a lot of room for improvement. Our main issues are:

  • instability of visual studio. An error in the debugged program can crash VS.
  • sometimes VS shows corrupted stacktraces (while WinDBG shows it correctly).
  • debugger wont show values of variables of type CHARACTER(LEN=:), ALLOCATABLE
  • Edit and Continue not supported

We used Sun workshop and it was very good, but there is no windows version.

Jan Mattsson
+2  A: 

Well, as others already mentioned you could use instead of an IDE a separate text editor. Several come to mind;
a) VIM (or one of the family) - great editing capabilities, very customizable. Unfortunatelly, it is still an editor - not an IDE. It can be customized in a variety of ways of course, but that gets boring after a while. Also, it's syntax highlighting capabilities are somewhat wrongly made. Also has some problems/confusions with free/fixed format and f77/f90/f95 ...
b) Emacs - pretty much same advantages/shortcomings as the above.
c) SlickEdit - has very nice fortran support; unfortunatelly, modifying it is a little annoying and the support forums are not much help.

In general, editors like the above mentioned can be used, but in that case it is best to choose one from the start and stick to it; modifying your work habits as you go; since customizing everything can be time consuming to suit your needs.

Most editors have problems with fortran's syntax, since they're used to C's (where everything that "opens" has a "close").

As far as IDE's goes, your options are not that great:
a) Silverfrost's compiler used to come with it's own IDE (Plato, if I do remember correctly; it's been a while) - don't know what happened to it, and whether it still is "alive" b) Absoft has one of it's own as well (never used it so ...) c) There was a specialized fortran editor I once encountered; ya...something; unfortunatelly I cannot remember it's name; maybe someone else will know d) One of the best options (which I used to use myself, so I may be biased) is Visual Studio + Resharper, which will add a few editing features to VS's editor. Most of them can also be accomplished with macros.

This post could use some editing but it is written in a hurry, so ...

ldigas
Amen to a good text editor - if I were running locally, I'd think about an IDE but so much of the Fortran I write anymore is for and on remote HPC systems, and the graphical connection back and forth is (charitably) less than steller.
Tim Whitcomb
A: 

I've never used it, but according to the documentation, the NetBeans C/C++ plugin also adds support for Fortran. I use NetBeans as my IDE for everything except .NET development and love it. If Fortran support is half as good as support for C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, and PHP, then it is worth looking at.

Thomas Owens
A: 

jedit has a nice fortran mode and you can define keybindings for the compiler and debugger. for small to medium sized projects it is quite nice. it also has svn and multiple files search. also very nice is hypersearch where you get a list of you matches and you can go to the position with a single click. another goodie is a plugin for gdb and for ctags. you can very easily script all functions using jython. it feels a little bit like a modern version of emacs that uses python instead of lisp. check out the plugin manager. it lets you download all the plugins from the server and installs them for you (like in eclipse).

http://www.jedit.org

f.jamitzky