Question about IDE

[MikeyBoy]

On Windows, Microsoft Visual Studio is the obvious choice - it's feature-rich, and is straightforward to use.

[Thomas1965]

Visual Studio seems to be common on Windows, but it's really huge and slow and has lot's of features most hobby programmers don't use. If you don't mind downloading several GBs then give it a try.

At the moment I play around with Geany. It's neat, fast and lightweight.
The question is actually if you should use an IDE at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqf6H1WSbeY

[jonnin]

I do not use an IDE for my home/hobby code (including at work, as my work code is hobby code, its either for my personal use to automate something or its embedded in a tool that needs like a 10 line function). I use notepadd++ and g++ on windows for these things.
If I wanted to make a gui or do something large scale, I would get a copy of visual studio. I have not done anything on that scale since vs 2008 version, though.

If you are learning or doing small console programs, I recommend this approach (notepad++ & compiler). It lets you get hands-on with the compiler, which is useful if you do something on unix, and it gets a lot of stuff out of the way that you don't need to be worrying about right now (visual really wants you to use microsoft's xor/managed c++ as they keep thinking they can improve languages by doing weird things and it does or did have these aggravating issues with the 'manifest' and 'precompiled headers' and other features that caused as many problems as they solved).

[againtry]

I use XCode and Qt, but Geany at 14MB would be hard to beat. EDIT: 14MB download that expands to about 142MB

Avoid CodeBlocks, Eclipse, NetBeans ... generally best described as rubbish.

[deleted account xyzzy]

While Visual Studio 2017/2019 has tons of good features and is the premiere Windows-based IDE there is also Code::Blocks. Or Visual Studio Code. C:B and VSC are not as greedy with HD space. Integrated features are not as extensive.

VS 2017/2019 require a lot of HD space because they install a lot more required non-C++ packages. .Net and C# for example.

If you have a decent CPU, VS 2019 runs decent on my older i5, and don't mind having 15-20 GBs gobbled up choose VS. I would suggest 2019 over 2017. 2019 is getting C++2A features added to the C++ package. 2017 is mostly getting security fixes.

If you do decide 2019 (or even 2017) you should do a custom install so you can include the C++ packages for the install.

When I installed 2017/2019 I did an offline install. I downloaded the entire suite and then installed from the local setup.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/create-an-offline-installation-of-visual-studio?view=vs-2019

I also installed on a secondary HD. The install still crammed a lot of files on my boot drive. 2017 was approximately 7GBs on C:\ and D:\. A bit less for 2019.

I installed the Community edition so all I needed to do is was activate the install with an email address. I created a "throwaway" email account with hotmail. Other than that minor inconvenience VS Community is one feature rich IDE.

[deleted account xyzzy]

There are also command-line compilers available. So you don't have the over-head of the IDE. A lot of experienced programmers are command-line compile warriors. I'm not experienced or all that knowledgeable about command-line compiling.

There are command-line compile tools available if you go with VS 2017/2019.

[againtry]

Well bugger me. Looks like @OP has bolted.

[salem c]

Well the OP had a bio as long as your arm and riddled with spammy links.

So even if googling their text doesn't show them to be a copy/paste bot from Reddit / SO, that they spent more time stuffing their bio rather than asking their question is perhaps a bad sign in itself.

[deleted account xyzzy]

@salem c, we've had a few 'newbies' like that lately. They'll post a question and then later edit the topic to add spam links.

[jonnin]

looks like some forums are vulnerable to edits that would not have been allowed if posted originally, so its a workaround to post spam. < 10 posts, broken english, and nonsense questions = spammer to me for now.