[vtkusers] Best Mac development environment?

[Michael Jackson]

On Dec 22, 2011, at 12:48 PM, Marcus D. Hanwell wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 12:45 PM, Sean McBride <sean at rogue-research.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:52:08 +0000, Steven Chall said:
>> 
>>> I've been developing a medium-sized application in Windows7: I've built
>>> VTK 5.8.0 and Qt 4.7.1 from source, along with my own C++ code, using
>>> Microsoft Visual Studio/VC++ 2010, generating the solution etc. with
>>> CMake.  I need to build the whole thing to run in Mac OSX.  What is the
>>> best development environment, and notably C++ compiler, to so this with
>>> on the Mac?  Thanks.
>> 
>> You pretty much have to install Xcode, which these days is available either on the 'Mac App Store' or by joining Apple's developer program.  It provides a GUI IDE, command line tools, etc.  CMake is able to generate Xcode project files or unix make files, either of which you can use on Mac OS.
>> 
> You need to install XCode, but as someone who has spent time
> developing code on the Mac too I would highly recommend you check out
> Qt Creator. It can use the standard Mac compilers, and CMake can
> generate the appropriate projects for it too. I use it on Linux and
> Mac frequently, it has a good code model with completion, GDB
> integration and other niceties. It has good git integration too.
> 
> There are also a few other cross platform IDEs that support C++, such
> as Eclipse, in many ways it depends on your preferences.
> 
> Marcus

 I like Eclipse CDT myself. In my opinion, if setup correctly, it can have far superior code completion (Intellisense) to Xcode or QtCreator. There is also the issue with Xcode that every time CMake has to run and regenerate the Xcode project any customizations that you do are erased. So, for example, if you have an application that takes arguments and you setup Xcode to take those arguments and then CMake forces a regeneration of the Xcode project you have to go back and re-enter those arguments. Not much the CMake devs can do about this but if your workflow involves things like this it can get annoying very quickly.
  QtCreator seems to be maturing quite nicely. I don't use it other than to test a few things so I can not really render an opinion. If you know your code inside and out and don't really need an IDE then a text editor and a terminal work real well. "BBEdit, TextMate, Editra" are all pretty decent code editors, along with the usual vi and emacs.

 Try them all and see which one you can wrap your head around. You will still have to install the Xcode development tools regardless of what you end up using.

Hope that helps;
-------
Mike Jackson