Good question. I might venture these would fit the bill but there's always an argument over what constitutes a dedicated IDE -But are there any dedicated IDEs left ?I do appreciate the appeal of using someone else's editor like VS Code which supports plug-ins or extensions, have done exactly that myself, but in trying to be 'all things to all men' I have always felt VS Code to be less appealing than a dedicated IDE should be.
- Android Studio
- Arduino IDE
- CLion
- MIT App Inventor
- Mu
- PyCharm
- Raspberry Pi Code Editor
- Thonny
- Visual Studio
The problem I have with VS Code is it feels too focused on extensibility to the detriment of actually using it for coding. The extensibility features are always there, front and centre.
Meanwhile configuring a Pico SDK build usually requires jumping through hoops; there's no easy "I've got this board, build my code for it, make it Run from RAM", no easy way to change that to build for something else.
A dedicated Pico IDE for me would have drop-down menu options for quickly choosing options, allow multiple builds if desired. My ideal Pico SDK IDE would have a choice of single build, radio button style selection in menus, or multiple builds with checkboxes in menus. I would want to be able to say "build for all these, Run from RAM and Run from Flash, zip the sources up, and zip the UF2, move them to my 'share with others' directory. All without having to fiddle with 'CMakeLists.txt' or '.json' files or reconfiguring extension settings.
It would be easy enough to do, it's just an extended tabbed editor. NotePad++ is the best in my book for Pico SDK builds but is still very lacking. I could, perhaps one day will, create my own, but that's on the back burner as I have most of what I want working for command line builds.
For each project I have build directories with the directory name specifying the target board and the build options. I have an app which configures and runs a build within the build directory or can do them all when in the parent directory. I can't be fussed having to figure out or remember what options 'cmake' should be launched with; computers were intended to save us from such drudgery.
Statistics: Posted by hippy — Wed Jul 23, 2025 9:08 am