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.