Can it be extended?

How easy is it to enhance the functionality of an IDE?

The majority of the programs in this Roundup expand their functionality using extensions or plugins. For example,

Eclipse builds all functions of value with extensions. In fact, if you’re looking for a C/C++ tool, you end up with CDT, which is Eclipse extended for C/C++. The Eclipse marketplace has almost 2,000 different solutions on its website. These cover many different languages and other tools such as code management and co-operative working.

Netbeans is more focused on Java, but the available plugins support many languages and other enhancements. You can also find these plugins elsewhere as .nbm files. Note that the netbeans.org site contains plugins up to revision 11.2, while newer versions are on the netbeans.apache.org site.

Pycharm has many helpful plugins for your Python programming tasks. However, for other languages you need to go to the rest of the products from this series. The IDE comes from the Jetbrains line of programming products. Many of them are free to download, but some are also commercial offerings. You can find many plugins for Qt Creator in the Qt Marketplace: some are for free; others are paid-for. An interesting feature is the availability of Emacs keys that can be used with Qt Creator FAKEVIM has been around for a long time, but now you can use Emacs keys in your work. Code::blocks is built around plugins, and its wiki shows three categories: the core, contrib and third-party plugins. It’s the thirdparty plugins that include vim and Python support. Overall, it’s important to remember that the availability of plugins is a key factor to consider when deciding on an IDE.