CLion licenses are free for people with university email addresses, and perhaps you can figure out some basic subset of CMake to just compile a few files.
In my experience, university CS courses are always pushing woefully outdated tooling and avoiding any remotely modern standard practices like the plague.
I was lucky to have one course in 2018 in which the professor actually included the most bare bones `git` usage.
I actually never had a class in which an IDE was recommended. In 2008 I did have a class on C (first half C, second half Java) in which we were restricted to using C89 because that was most widely adopted in industry. I really missed block-scoped variables in for loops (`for (int i = 0...)`).
Re:How a Zig IDE Could Work
by mirekrusin on Saturday February 11, 2023 @03:25AM
(#34750598)
Students should be learning how to move industries forward, not backward.
However, I wanted to make the distinction that while @systems asked about Eclipse as a Java IDE, which it is objectively terrible at, Eclipse is like NetBeans in that it is multi-language[1] and is likely more accessible as an open-source C++ IDE for university use than trying to get CLion licenses (and, ahem, then explain CMake to students :-/ )
1: yes, I'm acutely aware IDEA is also multi-language but the open source distribution only covers Java and Python, unlike Eclipse and NetBeans