Alternative IDE Options

jkoffman

Well-known member
Hi all,

I'm missing features on some of my other IDEs in the stock Arduino IDE. I'm on a Mac.

I know there has been discussion about getting CLI support working, and I'm assuming this is a precursor to using alternative IDEs.

Am I assuming right in this assumption? Or is there a way to get it to work (again, particularly on a Mac) today?

I'm also interested in what programs people like using. I'm hoping to look into Visual Code. I have used BBEdit and liked it. At this point I'm open to new discoveries though.

Thank you!
 
There are lots of options available for different things. Sometimes it depends on if you have a desire to have the code built the same way as Arduino does or wish to use something completely different

You can and I do some of the time, just go into Arduino preferences and and choose the use external editor option, and then edit using whatever editor you like, and the Arduino IDE will see the changed files and you can build over on Arduino.

I typically use Sublimetext to do editing, and we have some setup with stuff from FrankB and Defragster some scripts and the like that on Windows I can have sublimetext edit and do builds. There are

Many use PlatformIO.

You can take a look at VisualMicro stuff: https://www.visualmicro.com/page/Teensy-for-Microsoft-Visual-Studio.aspx

Luni - has a setup ...

But you might take a look at the unofficial WIKI which has a section on different building...
https://github.com/TeensyUser/doc/wiki
 
I use PlatformIO, not perfect but usable and i like it more then ArduinoIDE.

Part of what I don't understand about PlatformIO is that from what I read it appears to replace the Arduino toolset, which would also mean by passing Teensyduino. Or does it hook into the Arduino/Teensyduino compiler/uploader somehow? It looks very nice. I need to download Visual Code to see what the editor offers.

Thank you!
 
For me it looks like it uses Teensyduino, flashing utilizes the little Teensy Loader (Flasher) program.
 
Mac, still running Mojave.

Got it. I bought a new machine before all this craziness started, so I'm on Catalina. So far it's been doing ok. I need to update to the latest Teensyduino though! I should probably do that before trying to add another IDE as well.
 
+1 For PlatformIO!

PlatformIO uses the same tools and code from the Teensyduino installer, so it should be equivalent. There is sometimes a lag between Teensyduino releases and when that code makes it into a PlatformIO release. They did pull in the 1.52 release for testing yesterday.

PlatformIO is also great if you do embedded development on other platforms besides Teensy. It supports a huge number of boards, CPUs, frameworks and libraries easily.

FWIW, I don't use an IDE, I prefer a plain ol text editor and do my builds from the console with PlatformIO core, but your favorite IDE is probably supported: https://platformio.org/install/integration
 
I had a quick look at it last night and realized I definitely need to dig deeper because it looks very capable. I don't fully understand yet how to configure the Teensy (other than I know it's the .ini file, but I hope to find some examples). There's a step by step on their website that I plan to take a further look at today perhaps.

I did notice that Visual Studio Code doesn't have bookmarks, which is something I miss from my days in MPLAB. There might be an alternative, I need to dump in a file that's larger and spend a few minutes navigating it to see how it goes.

If you know of any other walk throughs for getting started, I'm on the prowl!
 
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