I have also yet to find an IDE as nice as Visual Studio...

Many of JetBrains IDE's are better and they're cross-platform. I've switched to Rider after getting sick of constant white screen of deaths, crashes, locking and perf issues in VS.NET. Rider is on par with VS.NET/R# for C# and superior for pretty much everything else except for visual GUI designers - although I haven't used one seriously in over a decade.

I'm very skeptical but I will try out JetBrains, thanks for the pointer! :)

EDIT: These all seem to be .NET development? I use Visual Studio mostly for C++... for that would you recommend CLion?

Yeah you'd use CLion for C/C++ development (tho AppCode includes C/C++ support as well), although haven't used that variant myself, but they're all built from the same high-quality core platform and share many components so I'd expect it to provide a quality experience for C/C++ as well.

I just gave CLion a whirl. It's decent, but unless I'm missing something massive, it's nowhere close to Visual Studio in terms of being a good experience IMO. The debugging experience is so rough in comparison. Aside from the fact that the shortcuts are pretty non-standard (F5 is "copy" instead of "debug"??) here are some issues I can see right away:

1. Artificially long delay when I hover on variables before I can see their values. This drives me insane.

2. I can't view the "raw" values of a variable; I can only see whatever it decides to show me. (So if there's an std::string, I can't examine its fields; at least not by default, if there's any way.)

3. The first time I tried running the debugger, the process stays hanging in the background. I couldn't kill it; I had to manually detach it from the debugger. This was literally the "hello world" example it came with.

4. The completion database for their hello world (all it includes is <iostream>) took quite a while longer than Visual Studio's did. I can't imagine what it's like for actual projects.

5. It initially told me I can't debug because I didn't have a project? So I had to reload the CMake project. This makes no sense.

6. There seems to be no filtering of private variables that I can't access (in the completion UI)? Maybe I'm missing something here.

7. There seems to be no obvious "immediate mode" in the debugger. I'm not well-versed enough to know if GDB has this feature, but regardless, whatever you have to type into GDB to get this feature would be more painful than in Visual Studio (where you literally just type the expression into the Immediate tab and press Enter).

8. Even the cursor hiccups repeatedly. Not that Visual Studio's is perfectly innocent in this regard either, but CLion's stuttering is far more pronounced, far more frequent, and far less excusable (see https://imgur.com/a/Huo2V).

This is just after a very quick use. It seems to "work" in the same way Eclipse does -- the functionality is "there" (maybe even more than what Visual Studio has), but it's just clunky and doesn't feel smooth or "integrated" (the 'I' in IDE).

I watched the CLion sales pitch video after reading the recommendation. Binging around for the features shown I then discovered Visual Assist[1] which seems to add comparably nifty code completion/generation etc features to Visual Studio. I'm demoing it just now, it's definitely worth a look if you have an itch that needs scratching.

It's better to add bells and whistles on top of a rock solid foundation such as VS than the other way around imo.

[1] https://www.wholetomato.com/

I used Visual Assist X with VS2008 actually. Functionally it made things better but UX-wise it was a bit sluggish and glitch from what I remember. If I get a chance I'll check out the newer versions (thanks for mentioning it) but somehow I expect something again similar this time around haha.

Interesting, okay thanks! I'll give it a try.

I don't know if its still the case, but I can honestly say with a straight face that at various points in the past decade I've used Netbeans for C development and it was fantastic. My understanding is that a lot of the Netbeans C/C++ code was ported over from Sun Studio, which is why it is so solid and mature.

Microsoft released Visual Studio for Linux [1] a little while ago. I find it to be excellent; it gives comparable functionality to Atom but with a lot of the stuff you get with plugins already built in.

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/

That's Visual Studio Code, not Visual Studio.

VSCode is a good text editor, but it doesn't compare to the full Visual Studio IDE.

Out of curiosity, what are the killer features of the full IDE over Code?

I'd probably suggest debugging being one of the main killer features.

I'm not a VS/VSCode user but I am a Sublime Text and PhpStorm user. You can debug in Sublime Text but I'm not sure you'd want it to be your primary debugger. I'd guess VSCode/VS might be similar.

And again taking Sublime Text and PhpStorm as an example, PhpStorm knows your code far, far better than Sublime Text ever would do and this makes navigating your code quicker and easier.