Any better IDE available?

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Any better IDE available?

By Tressie
- Wed Jul 15, 2015 5:04 am #23313 Hi,

Enjoying the ESP8266 development efforts, but docs are thin at this stage. Not a big deal, but the Arduino IDE doesn't help.

I'm used to highlighting something, and then using a 'go to definition' type facility on other IDEs, but Arduino's IDE isn't designed for that type of user. I spent fully 15-minutes looking for the definition of an 'IPAddress' class.

My question: what else might be available in terms of Arduino type IDEs, ones that give enhanced workflow for more advanced development?

Any help or comments greatly appreciated.

T. :roll:
Last edited by Tressie on Thu Jul 16, 2015 5:04 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Any better IDE available?

By kolban
- Wed Jul 15, 2015 9:28 am #23332 Howdy Tressie,
This is where things get interesting. There are other development environments for SDK programming ... however, the language and APIs you use in each will differ in each. For example, the Arduino IDE that this forum discusses provides an awesome Arduino "like" environment. If you come from an Arduino background or are relatively new to programming or want to run existing Arduino sketches ... this is the right place.

However, if you are a more experienced programmer, then you may want all the bells and whistles that a full blown IDE such as Eclipse might provide. For folks new to programming, Eclipse is complex ... it is much more a professionals tool than a hobbyists tool ...

An awesome member of the community has provided an Eclipse based IDE story that (for me) worked first time to build and deploy ESP8266 apps. This is what I use. However, there are swings and roundabouts here. If you program using the Eclipse environment, you don't get the "Arduino" wrappers that are provided with the Arduino IDE project so now you are programming to the ESP8266 SDK directly. And that's where philosophies start coming into play.

I don't know of the Arduino IDE chaps are going to supply their Arduino libraries as libraries you can use from a non Arduino IDE such as Eclipse ... if they did that, then the Eclipse story would be a direct alternative for you from the Arduino IDE. However, today ... you can jump to Eclipse ... just not program in the Arduino style.

See:
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=820
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Re: Any better IDE available?

By kenn
- Wed Jul 15, 2015 9:46 am #23335 I've been working with the 'CHERTs Unofficial Windows SDK' which is a Windows ESP8266 dev environment intended for use with Eclipse.

I like both Eclipse and NetBeans (with a slight preference for NetBeans) but both are competent and efficient IDEs. With regards to the Arduino stuff... I recall seeing somewhere that someone had provided instructions for how to do Arduino development in either Eclipse or Netbeans, but I can't remember where. Google is your friend...

I haven't myself dived into Arduino, I was brought up on PICs. But for the ESP8266, I am now mainly using the Sming framework because it's nicely done, it's in C++, and it leverages the Arduino libraries. And it's already set up for Eclipse.
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