IDE
IDE is an acronym for Integrated development Environment
Description
It's hard to pinpoint just exactly what an integrated development environment is. Many text editors, as they mature, begin to incorporate more and more features of an integrated development environment. The list of IDE's on this page simply includes all text editors, with a description of additional features that facilitate writing computer code.
See Also
Choosing an IDE for Tcl in 2022
- Tcl Editors
- a large list of editors
- coming to Tcl/Tk from an IDE environment
- addresses issues encountered by those that have used IDEs for other languages, and likely come to Tcl/Tk development with a particular set of expectations
Written in Tcl
- alited, a lite editor
- A modern Tcl/Tk based IDE.
- ased
- NEM: I quite like ASED, as an IDE for smaller projects, where Source Navigator is a bit over the top.
HJG: v3.0b16, last update: 2004-12
- Babel
- Vaporware
- CrowTDE
- Received positive response from the Tcl community.
- eZdit
- Tcl/Tk IDE.
- Komodo
- ActiveState's IDE for Tcl and other dynamic languages. Works perfectly with Tcl/Tk, perl, and a variety of other open-source scripting languages. It has Tcl editing functionality unique among IDEs, like edit-time syntax checking. The professional version comes with a Tk GUI-builder.
- MyTcl
- Tcl/Tk IDE
- RamDebugger
- A popular open-source debugger that includes a pretty complete IDE: editing with syntax coloring; debugging with breakpoints, variable watches, step over/step into. Even debugging of c++ code.
- ScriptIt!
- Minimalist IDE for Wish scripts.
- Sepp
- A simple IDE by Richard Suchenwirth, designed for best usability on PocketPC, and available via a series of pages on this wiki.
- Source Navigator
- Open-source. parsers scan through source code, extracting information from existing C, C++, Java, Tcl, incr tcl, FORTRAN, COBOL, and assembly programs and then use this information to build a project database. The database represents internal program structures, locations of function declarations, contents of class declarations, and relationships between program components. Source-Navigator graphical browsing tools use this database to query symbols (such as functions and global variables) and the relationships between them.
- TclTalk
- Have a conversation with the interpreter.
- TclTkIDE
- tcl/tk ide for windows.
- TIDE
- Proprietary IDE by Michael Haschek that is currently not being distributed
- Tiny Tcl/Tk IDE
- A minimalist IDE for emacs.
- TKproE
- Features widget property editing, geometry management, canvas editing, namespace management and font management capabilities.
- Tloona
- Features project management, code browsing of regular and .vfs filesystems, syntax highlighting, command expansion, a REPL. Inspired by Eclipse and Lisp/SLIME.
- Wize
- A relatively complete development environment using the .zip archive format to provide built-in packaging in order to deliver dependency-free applications.
Mibi's Tcl Editor : A very small Tcl IDE using ctext.
Not Written in Tcl
- IPEnv
- A versatile IDE with a multi-threaded command shell in which Tcl/Tk is fully integrated.
- Eclipse
- while initially developed as a Java IDE, there have been projects adding support for C/C++/Tcl/Perl, etc.
- Emacs
- Editor & kitchen sink; quite useful editor - and, for that matter, has within its community lots of components that, if loaded together, probably add up to much of what one thinks of as an IDE.
Those who don't like it may find ViM very practical (well, at least in *nix world). It doesn't have nearly the IDE features of EMACS, however.
- Geany
- Geany is a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment,
such as editor-tabs, syntax-highlighting, code-folding and code-navigation, support for compile/build/make/execute, support for plugins.
- Kdevelop
- KDE IDE
- Komodo
- IDE by ActiveState
- Microsoft Visual Studio
- Includes Visual C++, as well as nmake for managing build dependencies.
- netbeans
- A popular IDE in various programming communities. I have seen notes mentioning a plugin that adds Tcl editing support to NetBeans at several places, including [L1 ].
- ScriptDev
- A proprietary free IDE for Tcl, python, perl, ruby, lua, etc., supporting editing, debugging, running scripts written in these languages.
- ViM
- Emacs and Vim are the traditional kings of the text editing hill
Defunct
The following IDE's are gone, gone, gone.
Misc
Some people mention TclPro, but TclPro is NOT an IDE. At least not by the criteria listed as what features would be useful in a Tcl IDE. It does not have an integrated editor.
In fact, TclPro is a set of non-integrated tools. The TclPro debugger is a GUI-based, debug-only environment...
However, Komodo, historically considered a descendant of TclPro (though I suspect little or no code in common) is a proper IDE.
Some have referred to VisualGipsy as an IDE - but its description seems less an IDE and more a layout application. I don't know if it is still available.
escargo 2006-03-28: I was interested to see that several of the Python IDE projects are getting together to try to combine and consolidate their work, and remove duplication: http://pyxides.stani.be/
Whether such a thing is practical or desirable for Tcl and Tk as well would be its own discussion.
It seems like those people who venture off and create their own editors or IDEs are doing because of perceived gap in the functions of the IDEs that are already available. (Although some might be doing it purely as a learning experience.) Any new tool needs to offer enough advantages that the effort of learning a new tool and discarding old tools is worth the investment. There's got to be a substantial reason to switch. I've been thinking that something that an IDE or a Notebook App or Personal Wikis combined a feature like FIT might be worth doing.
tb 2007-06-12: People come to Tcl/Tk from different places with different preferences of workflow and code management. If they come here, look around and get a list of IDEs along with a short description, they can easily decide which one to go with. In contrast, to create a "OneAndOnlyIDE" for Tcl/Tk would always have to formalize things like code/documentation management, exchange and deployment. Although this has advantages, it would give Tcl/Tk only one face of many.
escargo: I recognize that one size does not fit all, but on the other hand, reinventing the wheel is often a waste of effort. To me it makes some sense to have a framework where different functions can be added on in a modular fashion so the whole assembly becomes more useful than in a bunch of separate, disparate tools that never get enough effort to be truly useful.