What are the best IDEs for C++ on Mac OS X?

Question

9

Options
Considered

187

User
Recs.

Aug 15, 2018

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

The Best 1 of 9 OptionsWhy?

Best IDEs for C++ on Mac OS X	Price	Platforms	Auto Complete
93 CLion	Free Trial	Windows, MacOS, Linux	Yes
84 Xcode	-	–	–
82 Netbeans	-	Windows, macOS, Linux	Yes
-- KDevelop	-	–	–
-- Eclipse (CDT)	-	Linux, Windows, MacOS X	yes

See Full List

8 Other Options Considered

Xcode

Top Pro

Supported by Apple

The fact that it's the recommended choice of the operating system maker is a benefit alone. See More

Top Con

Refactoring limited to C

C++ is not supported (or has very limited support) for refactoring. This means it will be a pain to rename a class or a variable across all your files at once. See More

Experience

Vicki Sainz

Could not figure out how to stop at breakpoints. Assumes I'm programming a phone app, not a backend project. Nothing was intuitive for me, after coming from IntelliJ. See More

Top Pro

Smoothly integrated to Mac OS X

Really nice user experience: runs fast and with a sleek interface. See More

Top Con

The download is too big (about 5.6 GB)

Top Pro

Powerful memory debugging and performance tools

Their leaks and zombies and built-in performance tools are time-savers and sometimes even life-savers. See More

Top Con

Some things are plain quirky

The way they do "Search" or "Search/Replace" (in source and in file) is a major PITA. The dialogs to call up the options for these are fiddly and the whole process highly unintuitive. See More

Top Pro

Easy to install

Just head to AppStore and install it for free. See More

Top Con

Poor performance

UI response is too slow. See More

Top Pro

Live syntax checking, built-in documentation, code completion

Makes programming quick and painless. See More

Top Pro

Integration with Objective-C

Xcode is the best IDE for writing Objective-C++. See More

See All

Netbeans

Top Con

A nightmare to install as of late

Netbeans requires a specific Java version, specific C++ compilers, specific tinkering. If you're not the tinkering kind, this could be weeks of searching online and discussing in forums to solve your particular issue. See More

Top Pro

Powerful debugging and performance optimization

Netbeans not only debugs your code, and points out errors but also gives you hints on which sections of your code could be further optimized. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS, Linux

Top Con

A little slow to load

The Netbeans IDE is known to take a large memory as compared to other lighter IDE's available in the market. Slowdown can decrease productivity and frustrate programmers. See More

Top Pro

Autocompletes your code

Code auto-completion is of great help in agile development environments, where you're pumping out a new version as soon as possible. In such environments you need your IDE to be "as fast as you code", hence Netbeans can be of great assistance in such situations. The IDE will auto-complete your code (variable names / function references / library functions / classes / ids) wherever possible, so you can code at speed. See More

See All

Eclipse (CDT)

Top Pro

Refactoring works great

Renaming a class or a variable across all your project works well; people have been using Eclipse CDT because of the missing "refactor C++" on Xcode. See More

Top Con

Code completion could be better

The default out-of-the-box code completion on the CDT can be a bit lacking when compared to Netbeans and Jetbrains. See More

Experience

CommunicativeTartarus

My default IDE on all platforms. Easy to install, easy to use, cross platform, with support for loads of languages See More

Specs

Platforms:Linux, Windows, MacOS X

Top Pro

Large selection of plug-ins

Eclipse has a large and active community, which has resulted in a wide variety of plug-ins. See More

Top Con

Plug-ins can be unstable

Though there are plenty of plug-ins to choose from, they aren't always reliable. Some aren't maintained, bug fixes can be slow, and you may need to download plug-ins from multiple sources. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Eclipse is an open source project and free to use. See More

Top Con

UI can be confusing

There's an overly abundant presence of menus, forcing you to constantly click around the different menu structures. See More

Top Pro

Macro definition browser

Top Pro

Good font rendering

Because Eclipse is based on SWT, it uses the native font rendering and thus looks better than other IDEs on some Linux systems, where the Java font rendering is not optimal. See More

Top Pro

Highly customizable

Thanks to the large variety of plug-ins and various configuration options, Eclipse is very customizable. See More

See All

Qt Creator

Top Pro

Great syntax highlighting and auto-completion

Qt Creator has a code model which basically has the same information as the compiler. So it can do really nice syntax highlighting (e.g. of virtual methods or local variables) as well as provide great code completion. See More

Top Con

Poor multi-window mode support

While multiple windows are supported, many operations will activate in the primary window (search, debug, goto-line... etc). See More

Specs

Platforms:Linux; Windows; MacOS

Top Pro

Fast and fully keyboard-navigatable

Responsive UI, no need to use the mouse for the power users. See More

Top Pro

Much space dedicated to the code

Small and beautiful UI, almost all the space is dedicated to the text with hardly and toolbars. Can actually be used on a 1024x768 pixel screen. See More

See All

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