The IDE Question

IDE stands for integrated development environment (reference) and provides under the same roof a set of tools to write and edit, compile and link, upload ans run code.

The list of features grows quickly, with many extensions for each part. For example,

• Improved editor provides code completion, contextual help, version management (e.g. based on GitHub).
  
• Optional utilities format the code according to established standards and generate documentation automatically.
  
• The build process offers error highlighting and recommendations for code optimisation.
• Along with running the code, integrated debugging allows to find and fix bugs, code tracing and resource profiling help to perform post-mortem analysis and code optimisation.
  

Everything under the same roof

In 2022

During the last decade, the offer of IDEs designed for the Wiring-Arduino SDK has evolved from limited patchy solutions to full-fledged profesionnal tools.

The offer in early days was rather confusing, with The Battle of IDEs. Looking for ​More IDE Options, the pioneers with extensive features were Visual Micro for Visual Studio and embedXcode for Xcode, albeit limited to Windows and macOS respectively.

Five years after Assessing the Next Generation of IDEs, today's recommended solutions include mature Visual Studio Code (with the dedicated Arduino extension or with the makefiles from embedXcode), PlatformIO and the official Arduino IDE 2.0.

The fabulous three

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Next

• The Battle of IDEs
• ​More IDE Options
  • Visual Micro for Visual Studio
  • embedXcode for Xcode
    
• Assessing the Next Generation of IDEs
  • Visual Studio Code
    
  • PlatformIO
  • Arduino IDE 2.0

​Posted: 03 Feb 2017
Updated: 17 May 2021, 03 Jan 2022