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up vote 17 down vote favorite
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This has nothing to do with having a favourite editor or anything like that. I was just wondering, per language, what are the most popular Integrated Development Environments? Maybe a top 2-3 if there is some contention. (Perceived popularity is enough)

Thus Far:

C# - Visual Studio, SharpDevelop

Java - Eclipse, NetBeans, IDEA

Objective-C - Xcode

Delphi - RAD Studio

Object Pascal - Delphi, Lazarus

C, C++ - Visual Studio, Vim

PL/SQL - RapidSQL, Oracle SQLDeveloper

PHP - Eclipse, NetBeans, Nusphere PHPed

Actionscript (AS2, AS3) - FlashDevelop

Flex - Flash Builder 4

Python - Eclipse, IDLE

Perl - Padre

Common Lisp - Lispworks, Emacs

Ruby - TextMate

Haskell - Vim

Fortran - Vim

Visual Basic - Visual Studio

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Is this a bit too broad? – MIA Sep 21 '10 at 15:40
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@Jim, why too broad? Just a question that lists IDEs, not compares and describes them. – Pavel Shved Sep 21 '10 at 15:44
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One way to treat this question would be to list one language/IDE pair per answer and let the # of upvotes gauge popularity. – Anna Lear♦ Sep 21 '10 at 19:00
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If this is going to become a voting thing it should be Community Wiki – WalterJ89 Sep 21 '10 at 19:09
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I agree that this should be community-wiki, not because it's a poll, but just because it's broad enough that it wouldn't make sense to have multiple answers for each language, so anyone should be able to edit them. – Gelatin Sep 22 '10 at 16:21
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closed as not constructive by Mark Trapp May 1 '11 at 3:54

As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, see the FAQ for guidance.

33 Answers

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up vote 19 down vote

All languages - VIM

I don't like IDE's.

If I'm on OSX I'll use TextMate at time, but mostly I do everything (JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP) in VIM. I'm also quicker then several colleagues who use an IntelliJ.

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I'm a bit disappointed it didn't say emacs, but +1 nevertheless. ^^ – gablin Sep 21 '10 at 18:01
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It asks what are the most popular IDEs, not which one you use. – Andrew Grimm Sep 21 '10 at 23:41
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@Andrew: Half the Zend dev team uses VIM. I doubt it's "unpopular" by any stretch. – Josh K Sep 22 '10 at 21:02
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up vote 13 down vote

Java - IDEA, Eclipse, NetBeans.

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In that order? If so, do you have a source? I would have thought it was Eclipse, NetBeans, IDEA or NetBeans, Eclipse, IDEA... – Chinmay Kanchi Sep 21 '10 at 16:27
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to my understanding Eclipse is the most popular for Java itself. – WalterJ89 Sep 21 '10 at 17:06
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@Chinmay Kanchi: Then I consider this question a success already! – Steve Evers Sep 21 '10 at 20:12
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@Chinmay - I listed them in order of my personal preference :) In fact, I would always prefer IDEA over the others. – talonx Sep 22 '10 at 4:20
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Walter's right: Eclipse is probably the most popular. IntelliJ IDEA is the best one though. :-) – Jonik Sep 22 '10 at 17:57
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up vote 10 down vote

Ruby

There's a question in the Hampton's Ruby Survey that may provide some concrete numbers about the "text editor" of preference in the Ruby world. Here's a chart of the results (at the time of writing):

A chart of the results for the "text editor of preference" question of the Hampton's Ruby Survey

The results suggest that TextMate is the most popular text editor among Ruby developers. It is worth noting that TextMate's popularity seems to be declining; so is the popularity of Eclipse based editors. On the other hand, the popularity of Vim, which I personally use, seems to be increasing.

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Vim is gaining! More power to the engines, don't let them get away! – Mark C Nov 23 '10 at 5:21
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up vote 6 down vote

Objective-C - Xcode

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What else can you write Obj-C in?! – Alex Feinman Sep 22 '10 at 18:01
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@Alex: ProjectCenter and ProjectManager under GNUstep, TextEdit under OpenStep, and emacs on pretty much anything all have Objective-C syntax support. There's a stillborn project to do Objective-C for Eclipse, which failed because the CDT didn't support ObjC. – Graham Lee Nov 3 '10 at 14:45
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up vote 5 down vote

For Delphi, the Delphi IDE.

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@Mark C: Dots in the gutter at the side of the editor that indicate where lines of executable code are. They show where the debugger will stop when you're tracing through the code, and where the valid lines to set breakpoints on are. There were some glitches in earlier IDEs that could break this functionality, though. – Mason Wheeler Oct 11 '10 at 4:45
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up vote 4 down vote

Common Lisp

Commercially, probably LispWorks.

Outside of the commercial implementations, almost certainly EMACS + SLIME

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up vote 4 down vote

C++: Visual Studio with Visual Assist X

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up vote 3 down vote

Java - Eclipse (Java EE, with Google App Eng, and GWT, and Plug-in for Version Control)

C++ - EMacs/Eclipse/GEdit

GEdit does a pretty good just at color coding most languages.

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up vote 3 down vote

Erlang - Emacs

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up vote 3 down vote

Everyone I know working with Python uses Emacs or Vim.

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up vote 3 down vote

For both Perl and Python: Emacs and Vim. Beats Eclipse in terms of popularity.

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up vote 2 down vote

For PHP there is also Nusphere PHPed which is absolutely great, not free but one of the best. I used to use it all the time.

For Haskell I would say vim,and that probably goes for C too.

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up vote 2 down vote

Object Pascal - Delphi, Lazarus

C,C++ - Bloodshed Dev C++ , Visual Studio 2008 C++

PL/SQL - RapidSQL (by Embarcadero), Oracle SQLDeveloper

C# - Visual Studio (Currently in 2008, but 2010 looks sweet when I upgrade!)

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2  
For the record, Dev-C++ is more than a little out of date. It includes MinGW-GCC 3.4, while the current release of MinGW-GCC is 4.5. wxDev-C++ supposedly comes with a more recent compiler, although I would say there are fer better alternatives. – greyfade Sep 21 '10 at 20:46
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---> CodeBlocks – Mark C Oct 5 '10 at 23:01
up vote 2 down vote

Visual Basic - Visual Studio
C++, Fortran - Visual Studio, Vim, Emacs

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up vote 1 down vote

Java - Eclipse, NetBeans

Python - IDLE? (Ships by default, don't know about popularity)

Perl - Padre

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up vote 1 down vote

I'm not sure, but I would say that the most popular in Python is Eclipse + pyDev

Everyone Ruby programmer I know uses TextMate in MacOS

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up vote 1 down vote

Was never really a fan of an IDE and find I learn the language better without the assistance. VIM was mentioned but at times I really am not interested in VIM and would rather use nano.

Nano Editor

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up vote 1 down vote

Actionscript(AS2,AS3) - FlashDevelop

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up vote 1 down vote

PHP

Actual PHP programming - Netbeans (PHP version) or Eclipse (PHP Development Tools)
PHP Templating - Dreamweaver

Note - By actual PHP programing I mean (for example) OOP using frameworks like CakePHP, Symfony or CodeIgniter.
By templating I mean using simple PHP for including headers/footers or formatting.

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I also see Komodo appear frequently in IDE discussion in the Drupal community. – gapple Sep 21 '10 at 18:30
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"PHP Eclipse" would be more accurate then "Eclipse", the PHP Eclipse package includes all the tool you need to develop PHP. – HoLyVieR Sep 21 '10 at 18:32
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up vote 1 down vote

JetBrains has IDE's for several languages that have a similar look & feel:

IntelliJ IDEA for Java

RubyMine for Ruby and Ruby on Rails

PHPStorm for PHP, HTML and JavaScript

PyCharm for Python and Django

(I have the last three.)

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up vote 1 down vote

One IDE that has been forgotten: Aptana - Eclipse based IDE for PHP, Ruby, Javascript and Python.

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up vote 0 down vote

Mine

.Net (3.5) - Visual studio 2008 .net 4 - visual studio 2010

flex - flash builder 4 / eclipse Java - Eclipse

ROR - TextMate HTML/CSS/JS etc - TextMate

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up vote 0 down vote

C# / Mono - I'd add MonoDevelop. Cross platform, so you have a C# IDE on Linux and Mac as well as Windows.

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up vote 0 down vote

C/C++ - Visual Studio C# - Visual Studio Java - Depends. I use java mostly for mobiles, so, for example, Blackberry I use the Blackberry JDE, for any other J2ME mobile, Java ME SDK 3. I once used JCreator PRO to develop, one, when i didnt knew specified tools existed to code for mobiles, xDDDDD JavaScript - Visual Studio, and that's cause i use mostly on my ASP.Net web applications Visual Basic - 6.0 on MSVB6, .Net on Visual Studio (there's a software my companie bought and that was debeloped on 6; I was assigned to mantain and develope it further PHP - DreamWeaver

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up vote 0 down vote

XSLT - XmlSpy, Visual Studio

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up vote 0 down vote

Not exactly freeware, but I'd use whats necessary.

  • C/C++ Win — Visual Studio 2010
  • C/C++/Fortran Linux —Netbeans
  • HTML/CSS — Dreamweaver
  • Perl — Activestate Komodo
  • PHP — Activestate Komodo
  • Python — Activestate Komodo
  • TCL — Activestate Komodo
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up vote 0 down vote

If you're including Vim, then Notepad++. I use it for most languages, including Java (compiled with Ant) and smaller C++ projects (compiled with MinGW), and it seems to be pretty popular in general, especially for web development. It has more/better features than some of the more popular IDE's I've used, even. I do prefer using Visual Studio for C# and XCode for Objective-C, though.

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up vote 0 down vote

Smalltalk - your own image.

So Squeak uses Squeak, Pharo uses Pharo, ...

I think only Gnu Smalltalk doesn't, where I suspect they use Emacs or Vim.

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