Development Environment

KDevelop 5.1

We should have covered KDevelop earlier. The major milestone of version 5.0 was passed in 2016, representing the successful completion of a journey for this long-standing programmer's development environment. KDevelop had an auspicious beginning back in 1999. It was the only graphical development environment for Linux that could make sense of the mess of makefile dependencies, and many developers found themselves using it. It was even popular outside of the KDE/Qt community because it used the best parts of the Kate text editor with Vim-like keybindings, syntax highlighting, and latterly, code completion.

But like KDE itself, KDevelop seemed to be completely rewritten just as one version was becoming stable. The poor reception of KDE 4.0 and the release of the excellent Qt Creator seemed to be double blows, and KDevelop development ground to a halt. Consequently, KDevelop 5.0 is the result of considerable effort over two years to bring the project back, moving the code from KDE 4 to KDE 5 and away from CMake to a new QMake project manager back end. Other languages and frameworks are also featured, with better support for QLM, Python, and PHP, alongside essential updated support for C++ 11 and KDE 5.

That KDE 5.1 comes only six months after 5.0 is the best possible indication that development is back on track. The move from internal code analysis to Clang in version 5.0 has started to pay off, with the addition of Cppcheck for static analysis of C/C++ code, and the general quality of the syntax highlighting and code parsing is absolutely fantastic. If you're a Python programmer, this new update may also make KDevelop a compelling alternative, with new support for Python 3.6 syntax and semantics. KDevelop is a great option for beginners, too, as obvious mistakes are highlighted and even solutions suggested. It does take up more CPU than Vim, but if you're programming all day, you sometimes need all the help you can get.

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