Best IDE for OS Development

[motosftos]

Is there any IDE to create operating systems in C/C++/Assembly?
If there, please tell me how to setup it for OSDEV or point me to a good tutorial.

Thanks

[portasynthinca3]

Hi!

I don't think that there is such thing as the "best IDE". Everyone chooses their development setup based on their taste, knowledge and such.
I personally have used Notepad++ for early bootloader development in assembly, then moved onto Visual Studio with the asm-dude extension. I finally have migrated to Linux and now use Visual Studio Code with C++ and X86 assembly extensions.

[iansjack]

Not wishing to be rude, but if you need a tutorial on how to set up an ide then you are not ready for OS development.

[nullplan]

In addition to my full endorsement of iansjack's reply, asking for the best IDE/editor/build system is akin to a religious question. You will get a ton of arguments and personal opinion, not much objective fact.

I use vim as editor, since I can use vim as editor everywhere. I use make as build system for the same reason. I dislike Eclipse for being (in my experience, at least) slower than molasses going uphill in January. On crutches. I have been told that's not the typical experience, though.

Most of all I dislike too much integration. So long as all the tools are different, if something goes wrong you can debug at the interfaces. If a build fails in an IDE, it will be really hard to debug.

[seL4cious]

I think it's fair to say that it's an objective fact that there is no "best IDE for OS dev", but a lot of people have enough experience to be able to say "<foo> is the best IDE for me" because they have played around to see what works.

I'm not too experienced, particularly with OS dev, but for me, I use spacemacs (a community driven emacs config), with a couple of tweaks here and there. I like it because it's incredibly easy from a Vim background, has very good command shortcut, searching, and customisation ergonomics, and you can get it to do just about anything if you're willing to spend some time on it. I would strongly encourage anyone to give it a generous chance to be comfortable with (it takes a while, but if it works for you, pays off in spades) before settling on their favorite.

Though spacemacs is amazing for me, there could be a better one for me, but I just haven't given it a chance yet. For example, I've used VS Code, and intellij, but not enough to be definitively able to say "Spacemacs is better than $IDE for me.".

Not wishing to be rude, but if you need a tutorial on how to set up an ide then you are not ready for OS development.

I would like to -1 that statement. Though I understand where you are coming from, the best thing we can do for the community is to encourage participation. I remember when I was much, much younger, I wanted to get into security, but this sort of attitude push 8-year old me away from tech in general and it wasn't until much later I came back. If we perceive someone as being out of their depth, by analogy we should help them learn to swim in a positive way, rather than promote an overall fear of water.

[mmdmine]

Visual Studio is so friendly. With COSMOS extension you can write monolithic 32-bit Kernels in C# easily (not from scratch, COSMOS includes some basis). The extension setups everything needed for you.
That's common to use these:
* GNU make
* an editor (like sublime, notepad++, vscode, micro, emacs or vim; I use all of them:))
* GDB and Qemu (for debugging)
* a terminal (I use fish shell and suckless' st terminal emulator)
But I saw one is using Visual Studio with his C++ OS.
Visual Studio is the most friendly thing which I saw. Jetbrains is good, too; but they are slow.
between editors I suggest you to use Sublime but first learn how to use and config it, it has a lot of options and shortcuts that I dont know and I'm too busy to learn them so I cant pleasure when I'm using it.

[max]

This is mostly about personal preference. I used Eclipse CDT for a long time and it works really well but it started feeling slower and slower. Now I‘ve switched to Visual Studio Code as it is very lightweight and the C/C++ extension works well enough to satisfy my completion needs.

[eekee]

I've slowly drifted to simpler and simpler text editors, but couldn't really recommend doing so. Complex interfaces confuse me, and code completion can actually make me feel like I'm on drugs, so I'm a bit limited in what I can use. Acme (from Plan 9) is a tolerable compromise for me, having a very orthogonal interface, but its internal window management gets in the way a bit. It actually works best with C code. Sam also has some good points. Both require pointing devices which I've recently had trouble with, so I stopped using them.

I've been using Watcom's VI instead, but no VI can be as regular and orthogonal as Acme, and it's got a couple of little bugs and missing features which make Vim somewhat preferable if you can tame it. I've got Vim in this Git Bash bundle, but it forces its own broken idea of indentation and syntax highlighting of Forth code. It ignores configuration to tell it not to treat .f files as Forth. Watcom's VI also has a configuration problems, but they don't affect me so much.

I've been writing Forth with gforth's blocked.fb, but it's mediocre even for a text editor with only 3KB source, 1KB documentation. To be honest, I haven't been programming much at all with this setup.