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My teacher recommended us to use notepad++ and cygwin for our programming needs. Are there any better solutions anyone can recommend out there to program and compile?
Myriad of various IDE's.... Eclipse CDT, Visual Studio Express, Code::Blocks, DevCPP....
And yes, Notepad++ and Cygwin with gcc would be a very viable option if you only need to compile single files for your homework.
Use a IDE
An integrated development environment (IDE) (also known as integrated design environment, integrated debugging environment or interactive development environment) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of:
a source code editor
a compiler and/or an interpreter
build automation tools
a debugger
A few of them to choose from
http://netbeans.org/index.html
http://www.codeblocks.org/
http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/
In my opinion, a very important tool for beginners is a debugger. A lot of question can be answered by yourself if you have a look into the debugger. You can use the gdb but it is hard to use and understand for beginners. So I would recommend to use Visual C++ 2010 Express which has an excellent and easy to use debugger.
Disclaimer:
The following are personal opinions, related to my personal taste on
the subject. Anyone in the programmer community has its own taste and
preferences an can agree or not. Here I just want to tell you about
some rationals. Consider products and related names as "examples."
My Answer
There are mainly three ways to write code:
The manual one
The assisted one
The automated one.
Think to them as:
Driving your car alone
Driving with a navigator
Driving with an autopilot.
Here "driving alone" means "use a generic text editor, a command-line based compiler and a command-line based debugger. The editor may eventually have a clue about the language syntax (thus differentiating different language structural elements, like keyword, literals, operators etc.) but knowing really nothing about what you are coding.
This is what notepad++ does. It makes coding harder, but for very simple things makes you really learn how to "drive".
A "navigator" is a basic IDE like Devc++, or like CodeBlocks: they have the notion of "project", manage the relation between files and manage the invocation of the compiler and debugger, managing the mapping on their output respect to your sources.
You write your own code, but the "road to compile" is told by the "navigator" you have to trust.
An "autopilot" is a more complex IDE (like VisualStudio, Netbeans, Eclipse ...) that can also "manage the code" providing code analysis for either syntax and semantics, context sensitive auto-completion, code generation for common tasks.
They can give you some code you have to complete and connect together.
They make you faster in producing code, testing it, debugging it, but you must have more trust in them or know how they "suggest".
They can be productive, but you have to "configure" them to suite your needs.
Now: since everything is a matter of "trust", and you cannot trust what you don't know yet, and is a matter of "knowing yuur needs" (but a learner may not yet have an idea abut them)
starting with "beasts" like VisualStudio (that mess arout 50% of your computer registry, pretend you to download GIGABYTES from the Internet and installs GIGABYTES of whatever MS library) is clueless: before you will start using all of that, will take years, and VS itself will be changed 2 or three times) or Eclipse (that has the more powerful syntax and semantic analizer, but requires lot of "arcane configuration" you don't even know since you didn't make the first step in programming) may be an excess. At least until your programs will stay in a couple of pages.
starting win notepad++ and GCC (or Mingw) is just a matter of dowload few megabytes, set a PATH, and you go. Fastest way to turn the key on.
when things become more complex, and require some help in organize them, simple IDE like CodeBloks or Codelite are more than effective at "to the point". I will avoid Dev-C++: it's OLD, and doesn't support the "state of art of the C++ language". You an live with them for all your scolarity
when going to more professional kind of projects, and your experience in "using tools" is better, things like Eclipse, or NetBeans may become more "effective". I will in any case avoid VisualStudio: it's not that "effective". But it is the best to develop in Microsoft environments producing MS oriented applications, especially in the ".Net" world. Something you will not see before 2/3 years of experience.
If you're learning you can download VStudio Express. I believe it's free. Easier to use than notepad and cygwin. This isn't a biased opinion. I'm a Linux C++ developer most days but acknowledge the fact that it might be easier to learn using VStudio.
If you are using linux, you can use kate and g++ for editing and compiling c++ files.
If you are using windows, I think your teacher's recommendations are good. Althought there are various IDE's for C++, it is better to use a simple editor that doesn't have code completion and compilation feature while learning a programming language for the first time. IDE's are nice but not good for learners I think.
It's probably a good idea to go with your teacher's suggestion, since you might also need some help in the future, either from him or your colleagues. Another advantage is that, being in school, you'll probably develop using more than one programming language. Notepad++ has support for almost everything you can think of, so you can use it not only for this course. That way you'll have an advantage because you'll learn shortcuts, etc...
If you plan on doing a lot of programming in the future, I highly recommend putting the effort into learning VIM. Nothing else can touch it in terms of speed and power. It has built-in shell access and it is programmable. It is like having God in your text editor. The major down-side is the steep learning curve.
Also, you want to use Git in-case you screw-up and want to go back to a previous point. It lets you periodically check-point your code so you can always go back. For example, maybe you delete something, then later on decide you want to use that code after all. If you've been check-pointing with Git, you can get it back.
Graphical differs sometimes come in handy too.
I started coding in C++ using Turbo C++(the default program available on college computers, I told them it was prehistoric), but then I found Visual Studio Express and never looked back since that day.
Also since i could not install Visual Studio on College computers, I put a portable version of DevC++ on my pen drive to use there.
Eventually I got the College to install Visual Studio Express editions on all Lab Computers (Once I managed to convince them that it was free with no Licensing issues)
For a beginner, go with a text editor and a compiler. Helps you in understanding what actually goes on.
You could use Dev-C++, which is a good compiler for C and C++, if you want lightweight.
Otherwise Visual Studio probably.
As far as I know it is hard to learn using Eclipse from scratch. But I will get such benefits as fast source code browsing, call graphs, static code analysis. What other benefits will I get from using Eclipse for C++ (CDT)?
I learned Eclipse for C++. It is flexible and offers many features. I no longer use it for C++.
What I found is that CDT feels like an "add on" rather than an intrinsically supported environment. Perhaps because it is an add on. Eclipse is written in and primarily supports Java development.
It was also rather buggy at the time but that was two years ago. I think today's CDT is probably more refined.
Lastly, it took a long time to start and some editing operations were rather slow. I was able to find a vi plugin for it, but it wasn't free and wasn't a perfect emulation.
Today I use a commercial editor that is fast and doesn't feel like it is out of its element. I would encourage you to try Eclipse and see for yourself if it meets your needs.
I used Eclipse with C++ only for a short time, and rather I could use Eclipse with Java for some months. Now that I'm not using it, I feel that some important features are missing.
Eclipse is pretty heavy, but has some great features that I can't find easily somewhere else.
I can live without code analysis and project management (for small projects), but some features about source code navigation and refactoring are really unique and I really miss them.
IMHO, Eclipse is worth learning, even if it won't become your default IDE.
If you don't want the giant size and lethargic performance of Eclipse, try Code::Blocks, which is a cross-platform C++ IDE actually written in C++. They have just released a spanking new version (10.05).
I've been using Eclipse now for more than 6 years and I couldn't find a (free) IDE which has so many features.
I neside the obvious ones (automatic build, syntax highlighting, indexing of function etc)
you have the plugins.
You are working with a versioning system? No need to learn the command line commands. Just use the appropriate Eclipse Plugin (SVN, C++).
You are using a testing framework? CUTE and ECUT provide you with macros to create the test suites and summarise their results.
Another nice bonus: Eclipse is available for Windows/Linux/OS X although it is slightly superior on Linux (due to the easy availability of other tools)
If Eclipse still does not have keyboard macros I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot poll for development with any language. Better to use vim or emacs IMO, or better yet emacs in viper-mode. :)
Some Points which should be true for most IDEs:
automated generation of build scripts
highligting of compiler errors and warnings in the source
integration with source control svn, git, ... (subversion, egit, ...)
code completion
debugging
other things (plugins)
Eclipse against other IDEs:
Platform independent
Free with complete functionality
I'd say that it is worth the effort to learn it.
Eclipse for C++ isn't as good as for Java, but it still beats not having any IDE.
F3 and Ctrl-Space is a good enough reason to leave any plain text editor behind.
Learning an IDE isn't a waste of your time at all. Try Eclipse, Visual Studio (if you're on that platform), Netbeans and anything you can think of. You might find something you really like.
Edit: Since you specify that you're on Windows, I'd say try out the free Visual Studio version. From my (limited) experience, it feels better suited for c++ on that platform.
It can help make cross-platform development (for Windows and Linux) a lot easier.
Very much depends on what you do.
If you need to work on shared projects that use Eclipse => learn it.
If you just write 10 or 100 lines of code altogether => use text editor.
If you just started coding, go for an IDE that works best for you. This can be Eclipse, but it could be Visual Studio on Windows or Xcode on Mac, especially given the choice of language.
For quite small projects, you can also get away with good editors that support syntax highlighting. Although a complete IDE makes editing, compiling and debugging much easier.
My choice is Xcode on Mac, Visual Studio on Windows. Eclipse only for Java for me on any platform.
Let me be very presumptuous for a moment and tell you what you really want.
You do not want to learn an IDE.
What you want is an easy and efficient tool, that will seamlessly assist you in writing c++ code. C++ is already difficult enough, ideally you should concentrate on it and forget about the IDE.
My advice. Let VI and Emacs to the dinosaurs. If you're on windows go for Visual Studio (the Express edition is freely available for personal use), otherwise Eclipse and Code::Blocks are good choices.
I rarely use an IDE. It is much easier and faster to use a good text editor (VEDIT) and then use make for building. Of course, you can call compilers, make, debugger etc. directly from VEDIT, then browse errors etc.
I have tried Eclipse a few times. The first thing I noticed is that it is really heavy. Cold start takes about 2 minutes on my machine, and subsequent starts around 20 to 30 seconds. (In comparison, with VEDIT, cold start is 1.5 seconds and any subsequent starts about 0.5 seconds.) The UI of Eclipse has lots of unnecessary clutter on screen, so there is not so much room for the code being edited. Eclipse can not edit files larger than a few megabytes, so you need another editor for editing large log files, memory dumps etc. anyway.
A good programmers editor does have fast source code browsing, function lists, call graphs etc, you do not need an IDE for that. The tools for static analysis (such as Lint, Klockworks etc.) are separate tools anyway, but you can call them from a text editor just as well as from IDE. Text editor can be integrated to version control, too (but you may need to do some configuration work yourself).
The advantage of a general purpose text editor is that you can use the same tool for all your text editing, so you will learn to use it effectively.
What is special about IDE is that it is usually more tightly coupled to some specific language. For example, it may contain full on-line help and code completion for the language library, API functions etc. Those may be useful to someone.
To my mind it is worth to learn Eclipse. Or just try it. It is widespread development environment. I saw various fields where Eclipse or IDEs based on it used from embedded development to mobile development.
I'm considering building a visual programming language, akin to Scratch, for use by children (a.k.a. poor typists) in programming micro-controllers or robots.
There is, for example, a project to build a graphical programming environment for the Arduino.
I really like Scratch, and would like the graphical coding to be similar. Scratches source is available under its own free license. It is written in Squeak (based on Smalltalk), and I don't know the language.
It occurs to me there might be other projects to build off of. When I looked through Wikipedia's list of graphical languages, I didn't see much that was open source and could be built off of.
I am familiar with C/C++, Python, and a little bit of Objective C. If I were to build my own project from scratch, I think I would use the Qt library, as I would want to build something cross-platform, but unfortunately, I don't know it either.
If I had an infinite amount of time to work on it, you can bet I'd learn Squeak and Qt and do an exhaustive search of all existing visual programming projects. That not being the case, I'm asking for opinions:
Is there an existing project that I should consider working from?
Would you recommend learning Squeak, or Qt, or something else?
If you are familiar with C/C++ then its worth learning QT. It should be easy for you to pick up and get going in no time. There are also plenty of examples that come with the package to get you started once you install it. From there you will be able to evaluate how best it can work for you.
I'm looking to be able to build GUI applications quickly and painlessly as possible. I'm competent (though not expert, and have no formal training) in C++, but have never used a GUI building toolkit or framework or anything. I am not a professional programmer and am totally inexperienced and ignorant when it comes to building GUI apps. Have spent hours researching trying to figure out what to do; only getting more confused and discouraged though.
Qt and wxWidgets seem like the most popular options for cross-platform apps, though cross-platform isn't necessarily all that important to me; Windows-only is fine if that means the fastest learning curve.
Qt seems cool and the Qt Creator is sweet looking with lots of good demos, except it has its own classes for everything, and I'm not overly keen on learning a bunch of stuff that's only applicable to the Qt platform itself rather than more generally. I suppose I could avoid using the Qt classes except for the GUI stuff where I have to use them, but I have no idea how wise or unwise that would be.
I was thinking Visual Studio would have the smallest learning curve, but when I open a test GUI app, I see a bunch of foreign looking stuff like carats (^) all over the place - I found online that these mean "handles", which I have trouble even understanding the definition or purpose of ("sort of like pointers but not really" is basically how I've read people define them).
I know pretty much nothing about wxWidgets, or how it compares with Qt.
So every option has a big learning curve - and ideally I'd like to know which one minimizes the time you have to spend learning the toolkit/framework itself. Since I'm likely never going to be making money from the programs I create, the time I spend learning a specific toolkit would be pretty costly. I just want to be able to make a functional program using the C++ knowledge I have, but in GUI form. At the moment it seems if I want to make a GUI app, I'd have to spend way more time learning the GUI framework I'd use than writing the functional part of the app itself.
Any input from people wiser and more experienced than me would be appreciated :)
First and foremost, start simple. There's a lot to the subject. If you are finding it hard, don't try and take it in all at once.
Most of the good GUI packages have tutorials. The best advice I can give is that you try each of them, or at least a couple of them. They are the best short introduction you can have to the library you choose and if they are any good they narrow down what you need to absorb at first. That will give you some basis for comparison, because they are each trying to do very similar things (and you will see some of them before you are done), but they have different feels. You will likely find you have a preference for one and that's the one to get serious with. It will also give you a sense of what's hard about GUI programming as separate from the particulars of one package, which, if you have only used one, you won't have seen. Personally I find this sort of knowledge very helpful, because it makes me less intimidated by particulars.
Here's a list of tutorials in one place, though you have likely seen them already:
Qt's tutorial
WxWidgets' tutorial
Gtkmm book. Not quite a tutorial, though there are lots of examples.
.NET tutorials, either for WinForms or for WPF.
Second, it sounds to me that you need to get some in depth understanding of the concepts of GUI programming, not just a particular library. Here there is no substitute for a book. I don't know all of them by a long shot, but the best of the bunch will not just teach you the details of a toolkit, they will teach you general concepts and how to use them. Here are some lists to start with though (and once you have titles, Amazon and Stack Overflow will help to pick one):
List of Qt books
WxWidgets book (PDF version)
There are tons of WPF and WinForms books. I can't make a good recommendation here unfortunately.
Third, take advantage of the design tools (Qt Creator, VS's form building and so on). Don't start by trying to read through all the code they generate: get your own small programs running first. Otherwise it's too hard to know what matters for a basic program and what doesn't. The details get lost. Once you've got the basics down though, Do use them as references to learn how to do specific effects. If you can get something to work in the design tools, then you can look at particular code they generate to be able to try on your own hand-written programs. They are very useful for intermediate learning.
I'm not overly keen on learning a bunch of stuff that's only applicable to the Qt platform itself rather than more generally.
I second the comment of GRB here: Don't worry about this. You are going to need to learn a lot specific to the toolkit no matter which toolkit you use. But you will also learn a lot that's general to GUI programming with any of the decent toolkits, because they are going to have to cover a lot of the same ground. Layouts, events, interaction between widgets/controls, understanding timers -- these will come up in any GUI toolkit you use.
However do be aware that any serious GUI package is an investment of time. You will have a much easier time learning a second package if you decide to pick one up, but every large library has its personality and much of your time will be spent learning its quirks. That is, I think, a given in dealing with any complex subject.
I suppose I could avoid using the Qt classes except for the GUI stuff where I have to use them, but I have no idea how wise or unwise that would be.
You do not need most of the non-GUI classes of Qt to use Qt's GUI properly. There are a handful of exceptions (like QVariant) which you'll need just because the GUI classes use them. I found you can learn those on a case-by-case basis.
Which is the easiest to learn is really going to depend on how you personally learn.
Personally, I've found Qt to be the easiest to learn so far. The GUI classes are rather nice to use, but I've found the non-GUI classes to be excellent, making it easy to avoid a lot of common issues you'd normally get with a more basic API. The documentation is excellent, IMO, as are the books, the examples, etc. It's also being very actively developed, with a few new technologies coming in the near future (like DeclarativeUI).
I've found Visual Studio/Windows API/.Net to be a good bit more complicated to learn. The API documentation on MSDN is rather complicated and not really organized in a manner that I find intuitive.
I've tried learning WxWidgets a few times, but I've never liked the API documentation.
All this is just my personal experience, YMMV of course. I'd say just dabble in all of them and see which one takes you the furthest, it won't hurt to try multiple.
As a person who learned C++ through Qt, I can only say that they work very well together. C++ purists (like I have become) will find lots of things in Qt not to their liking (the moc preprocessor, e.g., and the continued absence of exceptions for error reporting), but looking back, Qt provided a very gentle introduction to C++ for me.
And if you're like me, you throw in a handful of boost libs in each Qt project, because we want to write "real" C++, not the softened thing Qt uses :)
I would suggest wxWidgets. To me, it's pretty intuitive and looks nice.
Code::Blocks was built with it, so check that out to see if you like the graphics.
There are also a slew of bindings for wxWidgets, such as wxPython, wxErlang, and others, so if you decide to switch off of C++, you can take wxWidgets with you.
I also use wxWidgets and use it all the time for Windows-only applications (the only downside is that wxWidgets is notorious for large .exe filesizes, which may or may not be a problem for you). I found it very simple to use from the start, especially when combined with a GUI designer (personally I use wxDev-C++).
I've never used Qt, so I can't speak to its simplicity, but I doubt the difficulty is on a vastly different scale than that of wxWidgets. However, what I can say is that no matter what API you use (wxWidgets, Qt, WinAPI, etc) your code will be "locked into" that particular platform, so don't worry if you feel that learning Qt will lock you into the Qt platform (because the same thing will happen with any of those APIs).
If you're working solely on Windows however, you may want to do a few simple programs with WinAPI first. That way you have a basic understanding of the lowest level of Windows GUI programming before you move onto Qt/wxWidgets. That said, if you're really into cross-platform programming, then don't worry about that and go straight into Qt/wxWidgets.
I can't intelligently comment on the learning curve aspect, but a quick survey of StackOverflow questions shows about twice as many Visual C++ questions as Qt questions. Probably means that there is a larger support group in place for Visual C++. Might make learning it a little easier if there are more folks to help out.
No matter what you pick, I am quite sure it won't be easy and painless.
Having said that, I know that in some schools they use FLTK because they consider it relativelly easy to learn. I have never tried it.
In my everyday work I use WTL which is as close to the system as it gets while still providing some level of abstraction over pure Win32. I am not sure if I would consider it easy to learn, though, especially given the lack of documentation.
I recommend codegear C++ builder (previously known as borland C++ builder) from codegear which comes with a 30 trial. The nicest thing about it is that the GUI provides you with components that you drop onto a form in a WYSIWYG fashion and make functional by adding code to handle the events it fires. It comes with a whole bunch of compontents out of the box and you can add 3rd party components to it too, like the awesome ExpressQuantumGrid from devexpress, or write your own. It's very powerfull if you know what you're doing but intuitive enough that a beginner can write a database CRUD application in about 20 lines of very simple code.
Since nobody has mentioned it yet, for the sake of completeness, have a plug for the Fox toolkit. This is the one I used last time I did any C++ UI work of my own volition. There are also binding for this to Ruby and Python (the latter being many years out of date, though).
In general, the choice of a toolkit for self-directed work comes down to personal preferences for
the layout manager style
the event handler registration style
How native the widget set looks/can be made to look
If cross-platforming is not necessary, try .net + msvs or delphi. easy, all-in-one, no pain.
Qt is the best option for you. It's the easiest to learn, the most elegant and powerful and it is completely free.
Visual C++: This is an IDE, but it comes with its own GUI library called MFC. MFC is an old library with many quirks and it is difficult to learn and use. Many C++ programmers use it on Windows because it comes from MS, it's fast and it's free if you buy Visual C++. Since VC++ is an IDE, you can also use wxWidgets and Qt with it, although in your particular case I would recommend Qt Creator instead.
You seem to have experimented with Managed C++. Don't use that, even MS recommends that you only use Managed C++ as glue between C++ and C#.
wxWidgets: This one was a strong contender up to the day when Qt became free for commercial projects. It was always in the shadow of Qt and it is known that the documentation is not very good and the API is not as easy to learn as Qt's. Cross-platform MFC would be a good way to describe it.
C++ Builder: Borland made too many mistakes with C++ Builder and ended up getting out of the dev tools business altogether. It was a good product and I originally learned Windows GUI programming in one of the first versions, but I won't use it any more. There are better options and it is too expensive.
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I'm looking for a good IDE for C++ that has most or all of the following properties (well, the first 4 or 5 ones are mandatory):
cross-platform (at least Mac, Linux)
of course, syntax highlighting and other basic coding editor functionality
reasonably responsive GUI, not too sluggish on mid-size (say, 100 files) projects (both my Linux and Mac computers are 5 years old)
code completion
integration with gdb
SVN integration would be nice too
refactoring (rename a variable semi-automatically throughout the codebase, etc.)
can display class hierarchy
can add hypertext-style links to the code (so you can click on a function/class name and it brings you to the declaration),
can show code parts that (potentially) call my function (I know that's hard to do for C++ so I added the potentially)
So far, I've been using Emacs for everything, but I think advanced features that give me more overview and search capabilities like the last three would be nice. I'm tired of just using grep and find on my codebase.
Basically, I want most of the things for C++ development that Java IDEs usually do.
I see Netbeans can be used for C++, as well as Eclipse. I think they would fit my requirements. Has anyone actually used them for daily coding? What are the differences? What are your experiences? Code::Blocks is more lightweight and doesn't do many of the things listed above, right?
Note: I don't need a GUI builder.
Update: With the bullet point 10 I mean that I can give it a function name (e.g. Foo::setValue), and it shows me all occurrences where this particular function (and not other functions of the same name, like Bar::setValue) is called in my codebase.
Code::Blocks does the first 5 and it's also got class method browsing (though not a heirarchy display). It's a much more lightweight solition thaen Eclipse or NetBeans, but if you like the minimalist approach it's pretty good.
To summarise CB versus your requirements:
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
No - but you can add it easily
No
No, but similar functionality
No
Can go from definition to decl and vice versa, but no callers list
As all the solutions you mention are free, you could always try them all and then make a decision on which one to stick with. That's what I did.
In addition to the ones mentioned, there's QTCreator, which has "Rapid code navigation tools" though I've not used it.
I think though that the non-essential requirements aren't so good, you can easily see where a method is being called using search! (of course, if you have a huge class hierarchy where every class has the same named method, you've only yourself to blame :) if you havn't laid your classes out in an easily understandable way)
I'd recomend Netbeans, in 6.5, its pretty fast IDE and offers all 10 of your requirements.
I recently asked this same question. I ended up choosing Eclipse with the CDT plugin and the Cygwin libraries. I've been pretty happy with it, except I haven't quite got the hang of the debugger. The window for walking through source on the debug perspective is pretty small, for some reason I haven't figured out how to see into arrays, and I think I knocked out one of the windows for displaying variables and don't know how to get it back. I've ended up abandoning the debugger perspective and just walk through debugs in the normal perspective.
Also, I use Eclipse for Java, so the helped minimize the learning curve. It can do refactoring and you can integrate svn.
Java based IDEs (Netbeans and Eclipse) are sometimes somewhat slow. Also their main focus is Java. One problem with Eclipse is that it is difficult to use for small screens, such as in laptops. I prefer to work usually in vim + ctags (to perform the functions of grep and find), and when I have some advanced operations like comparing two directory hierarchies, I use Eclipse. I've not used Code::Blocks much, but I hear good things about it.
Coming from Emacs, I think you'd prefer something lightweight and not heavy-weight. I would consider Code::Blocks then as a good candidate for exploration.
codeblocks is open source !!
http://www.codeblocks.org/
Go for Eclipse. If you have a decent computer, it is fast enough and has best possibilities with its plug-ins.
codeblocks have a lot of features just check them up !
and it is free !
If you already know Emacs, it may be easier to just start using a few more packages, than learn a whole new IDE.
For example, you can easily do #9 with Emacs: just run tags once and then M-. RET anywhere.
You also have to weigh the IDE's features against what you lose. For example, most IDEs don't tend to have Emacs' easy macro capabilities or numeric prefixes, which are often like a more general form of refactoring.
It is not only the IDE that matters - you would probably need to be able to build you application outside of the IDE (i.e. continuous integration).
Consider using CMake to create a cross-platform description of your build scripts. Once you have the CMake Script (which is straightforward) you can generate from it project files for the IDE of your choice - eclipse, kdevelop, Visual Studio, codeblocks, etc.
I would suggest using eclipse as an IDE. There are few options of how to use CMake with eclipse. Play around, and find the best for you.
Once more - CMake is not only cross-platform it is also cross-IDE. And CMake scripts are very readable, a simple make file would look like this:
project(hello)
add_executable(hello hello.cpp)
Now compare that with makefiles, or setting up a project in your favorite IDE!
My two cents (in no particular order ... and not all these options are c++):
Qt ... my first productive GUI building framework
Lazarus ... what a cool name, and very productive tool (not c++ though)
MonoDevelop ... I'm falling in love with c# development (very much like c++)
Java ... ubiquitous ( a bit like c++)
CHEERS!
Sublime Text Editor is the best cross platform editor so far I have seen. Try using it http://www.sublimetext.com/. It comes with unlimited demo period without suppressing any of its functionality. But if you are satisfied with that, please buy and use it to credit the author.