Ask HN: What Is The Best Free IDE?

Check out Eclipse, its a great cross-platform IDE, some people don't like its speed as it is in Java, but it gets the job done.

Though YMMV depending on what you code in. Some IDEs are better suited for certain languages than others.

Best to start with a comparison page (link below) then google/ask questions once you get a list of what looks good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_integrated_develo...

We'd do better if you told us which languages you plan to work on. For instance, IntelliJ Idea, community edition, is a pretty strong contender, but it's at its best in JVM languages.

Personally I'd only bother with an IDE for Java, Objective-C or C# - then I'd choose IntelliJ, Xcode and Visual Studio respectively.

I'd stick to a text editor otherwise.

Same here. And for the editor, I stick to Sublime Text.

The combo of emacs, slime, ac-slime, paredit, redshank.

While I agree that emacs is great, the OP hasn't specified that he or she wanted to code in Lisp.

Thank you for mentioning redshank otherwise, it looks quite powerful.

my current favorite free IDE is lighttable.

Emacs

Vim

v I m