What alternatives to Arduino IDE you have

The most popular tool used for Arduino programming with almost all market shares is Arduino IDE. In this post I’d like to briefly describe other options. All solutions will be described thoroughly in future blog posts if you want to try them. I’ll also include possibility for embedded programming with each platform if you’re going to go beyond arduino and program avr or stm microcontrollers.

First of all, why not to use Arduino IDE. The reason is pretty simple - in my opinion it’s just not pleasant to work with. It’s neither simple text editor nor programming IDE. It’s lays somewhere between, being a bit to complicated for simple text editor and lacking powerful features from real programming IDEs. Game changer for me is autocompletion, which speeds writing code by a lot. It’s not present in Arduino IDE. I encourage you to try following solutions. I’m pretty sure you won’t regret it. Keep in mind they may require some configuration before first use, but it’s worth it.

Visual Studio Code

Well, I said before about Arduino IDE “it’s neither simple text editor nor programming IDE” and we can say exactly the same about Visual Studio Code. However it’s just doing better job. It’s pretty lightweight tool, in fact I use it in daily basis as notepad replacement, but with huge number of available plugins you can transform it to pretty powerful platform. So there is of course plugin for arduino programming. Embedded developers will find something for them too. I recommend Visual Studio Code for small projects. On the other hand I would use something else for bigger ones, it’s still fine though.

For detailed description about using Visual Studio Code in arduino and embedded programming check corresponding post on my blog.

Eclipse

I have to admit I don’t like Eclipse, still it’s very popular and commonly used IDE. We have the power of open source software here. Similar to Visual Studio Code, Eclipse has enormous number of available plugins. So we have plugin for arduino, but we also have official plugins for most micro controllers families. The Eclipse advantage that may be very important for less experience arduino and embedded system enthusiasts is that Eclipse is very easy to configure and get started. Moreover it has very big community.

So why I don’t like it, well it’s somewhat unintuitive for me and I usually spend a lot of time configuring it to match my preferences (Eclipse is highly configurable). Then it’s decent, but for generic programming. Plugins tend to mess with some of my settings for unknown reasons, that’s the problem. Nevertheless I suggest you to not rely on my opinion and try it yourself. You may like it.

For detailed description about using Eclipse in arduino and embedded programming check corresponding post on my blog.

Visual Studio

We’ve talked about Visual Studio Code, now we’ll take look at bigger brother - Visual Studio. You know already I’m not a big fan of Eclipse. In contrast I have to say I absolutely love Visual Studio. Especially the debugger is the best one I’ve ever used.

Definitely it’s great IDE, although it’s used mainly for C# programming. Well, that’s not what you probably expected in post about Arduino programming, but don’t worry. You can use it for Arduino programming purposes with use of helpful plugin. Furthermore there is also plugin for generic embedded development, unfortunately it’s not free. However in my opinion it’s decent and the price is affordable.

For detailed description about using Visual Studio in arduino and embedded programming check corresponding post on my blog.

CLion

The last IDE I want to show you is CLion from JetBrains. Unlike rest of the solutions i’ve mentioned before CLion isn’t free. You will have have to pay annual subscription if you want to use it. Nonetheless it’s the best. Not only it provides stunning experience during coding (yeah, I’m a fan of JetBrains products), but also gives you great debugger, comparable to one from Visual Studio. Moreover it’s awesome tool for generic embedded development. I recommend it, it’s awesome.

Additionally if you study on university you’re lucky, because you can get it for free. There is also option for free license if you want to use it in open source project.

For detailed description about using CLion in arduino and embedded programming check corresponding post on my blog.

To summarise I really encourage you to try at least one of the presented solutions. All of them are infinitely better than Arduino IDE. As promised I will make tutorials about configuring and getting started with each one from four mentioned. If it’s not ready yet, please stay tuned and check my blog later.

Happy programming!