Code::Blocks

Code Blocks is a free integrated development environment for Windows.

If you’re looking for an integrated development environment or IDE for Windows that’s free, versatile, and highly customizable, then you’ll find a lot to like with Code Blocks. This suite offers most of the advanced tools you’d expect from a modern development environment, including syntax highlighting and the ability to collapse and expand blocks of code, hence the name.

Code Block supports more than 20 different compilers out of the box, and it features automatic detection of compilers. That means that it can detect Microsoft Visual C++ installed and automatically make the relevant options available to you in the program. This saves you the trouble of having to point the IDE to a compiler and create default settings. You’ll still have access to advanced settings that you can alter on a per-compiler or per-project basis.

The behavior of the Code Blocks IDE is determined by templates. The program supports project templates, build target templates, file templates, custom templates, and user-defined templates, which can build off of other templates. There are dozens of templates provided by Code Blocks out of the box. There are many community-created templates to choose from as well or you can create your own.

Code Block supports tools, so you can link it to third-party or proprietary tools that you can run from within the development environment. The IDE also has a plugin architecture. Plugin creation is simple. There’s even a template for it, and you can use plugins to expand the functionality of the IDE in many different ways. There are also many plugins created by the community, but if there’s a downside to Code Blocks, it’s that the quality of community-created plugins can be a bit hit or miss.