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Recently i start to studying C/gtk+ programming. And want to ask one question: what are the IDEs available for C/gtk+ development apart from command line interface?

Thank you.

Community
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0xAX
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    Checkout Vala [http://live.gnome.org/Vala], its a new (2006) great language specially for GTK/Gnome development – lepe Dec 28 '11 at 04:37

5 Answers5

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In my (biased) opinion and experience, you're better off learning GTK by command-line compilation and your favorite editor (gedit, kate, vi, emacs, whatever). This way, you can learn at your own pace rather than trying to grapple with a big complicated IDE that really isn't beginner-friendly. Nonetheless, be aware of devhelp (GTK's development documentation program) and try building a couple GUIs with glade3 and using them in your C programs.

This might not be the answer you want, but I feel that C/C++ GUI IDEs tend to suck, at least for beginners.

Anjuta can do C/GTK+, but I personally wasn't very impressed with it. It asks you what plugin you want to open .glade files with, new projects are built with autoconf (resulting in a mess of over 70 files for a simple "Hello world") and localized with gettext by default (resulting in a bunch of boilerplate code in main.c), and it pops dialogs like this when you invoke weird edge cases such as double clicking a button you just created:

Error while adding a new handler stub: There is no associated editor for the designer. To avoid this message turn off "(null)" flag in Preferences->Glade GUI Designer

My impression of Anjuta from the perspective of a beginner was, as you can tell, highly negative. It shows a whole lot of advanced options, but doesn't let you do basic tasks without a lot of hassle. Anjuta is not alone. In general, I don't believe I've ever found a (mature) C/C++ IDE for any GUI toolkit that was easy for a beginner like me.

Joey Adams
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    "I don't believe I've ever found a (mature) C/C++ IDE for any GUI toolkit..." What about Qt Builder + Qt Designer? IMHO its a great IDE! – lepe Dec 28 '11 at 04:35
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There's really nothing all that special about GTK+, it's a pretty standard C API and so any IDE that lets you program C is going to work well for GTK+. Examples include Eclipse and Code::Blocks.

You can also use Glade as RAD tool for developing GTK+ GUIs in a graphical way. Use of Glade is pretty much IDE-independent, though.

Dean Harding
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Personally I find that Eclipse CDT and Glade make a pretty good combination. Eclipse doesn't need you to use Autotools, etc. If you're under Debian/Ubuntu, I'd recommend manually installing Eclipse instead of using the repository version.

detly
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Eclipse or Anjuta IDE. I found Anjuta IDE comfortable.

iCoder
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NetBeans has a pretty good C/C++ suport and if you want a designer I'd second Glade. I personally prefer Emacs + Semantic + ECB for C development.

Bozhidar Batsov
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