When comparing CLion vs Ninja IDE, the Slant community recommends CLion for most people. In the question“What are the best IDEs for C++ on UNIX-like systems?” CLion is ranked 5th while Ninja IDE is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose CLion is:
CLion has an intelligent autocompletion engine that tries to predict the symbol you are typing based on your previous history and the context in which it's being typed.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Intelligent code completion
CLion has an intelligent autocompletion engine that tries to predict the symbol you are typing based on your previous history and the context in which it's being typed.
Pro Cross platform
Clion works on Windows, Linux and OSX.
Pro Syntax highlighting
Pro Extensible
Plugins can easily be created to add features that you may need but are otherwise missing from the IDE.
Pro Virtualenv support
Has out of the box support for virtualenv, which can be added when first starting a project or later through the settings.
Pro Embedded Python console
Has an embedded python console built in.
Pro Script runner
It is possible to run the project or any file opened in the editor with just one click.
Pro Find in files / find usages
Allows you to search one or more words, a regular expression, etc.
Pro Breakpoints
Pro Multi-platform
- GNU/Linux
- OS X
- Windows
Pro Built-in static analysis
NInja IDE highlights both static and PEP8 errors in a file. With each type of error having its own icon.
Pro Web-inspector
Pro Render HTML files
Also supports rendering HTML files currently loaded in the editor.
Pro Project management
Allows you to manage projects, saving descriptions and information about them and letting the user to perform file management related task inside the IDE itself.
Pro Easily locate code
Code locator allows quick and direct access to any file, function or class inside one of the project by simply pressing a few keys. Pressing Ctrl + K
open a popup over a text field, where you can type the name of what you want.
Pro Symbols explorer built in
You can easily see all functions, classes and attributes in the current program.
Pro Written in Python
Pro Bash support
Pro Sublime snippets
Pro Multi-language support
Cons
Con Proprietary
Clion is proprietary software which costs $199/1st year for a business license or $89/1st year for an individual license.
Con Build Tool Integration is messy/over complicated
I have a Jetbrains annual subscription so I can use this tool for free and I've used the Java IDE for years so I really want to like CLion. But it's just over complex to add 3rd party libraries etc. Netbeans/Eclipse etc are much better integrated with the build tools
Con Latest version (2.3) is from 2013
But it looks like the project is still maintained towards 3.0 release.
Con Bad performance
Freezes and slows down often.
