I'd respectfully disagree on VS 6. It was OK for its time, but hardly a piece of art, in my experience.
Please excuse me copying the relevant portion from my other comment.
VS 6's support of C++ back in 2005 wasn't that great, at leat the way I remember it now.
Code navigation was very primitive, and you were lucky if it didn't consider the code too complex to offer any navigation around it at all.
Its built-in debugger often wouldn't let you inspect a string's content because it was just another pointer from the debugger's perspective.
And there was a bug, where the editor would slow down so much it would be littery unusable -- e.g., it'd take a couple seconds to react to a key stroke. The reason was it kept a file with the workspace's (solution in today's terms) code metadata and that file grew too big over time. So you had to remember to delete it regularly.
But VS 6 had a great plugin -- Visual Tomato, if memory serves -- that made things so much better in terms of code navigation/refactoring/etc.
Compared to modern IDEs it won't do very well, but do you remember better alternatives back then, at least if you wanted a "friendly" UI instead of a command line one? Would you choose something different if you go back to 2005? how about 1998?
myk9001|2 years ago
Please excuse me copying the relevant portion from my other comment.
VS 6's support of C++ back in 2005 wasn't that great, at leat the way I remember it now.
Code navigation was very primitive, and you were lucky if it didn't consider the code too complex to offer any navigation around it at all.
Its built-in debugger often wouldn't let you inspect a string's content because it was just another pointer from the debugger's perspective.
And there was a bug, where the editor would slow down so much it would be littery unusable -- e.g., it'd take a couple seconds to react to a key stroke. The reason was it kept a file with the workspace's (solution in today's terms) code metadata and that file grew too big over time. So you had to remember to delete it regularly.
But VS 6 had a great plugin -- Visual Tomato, if memory serves -- that made things so much better in terms of code navigation/refactoring/etc.
sn_master|2 years ago
pjmlp|2 years ago
Visual Assist being a well known one.
It isn't as if JetBrains products aren't full of plugins as well.