When developing on Raspberry Pi, most IDEs are too cumbersome or have not been ported fully to Linux. In their official list, I couldn’t find one that I liked.
2020 Answer — Visual Studio Code
Since I published this first in 2017, Visual Studio Code has been open-sourced and has become a favorite of many of the programmers on my teams. They have fully open sourced it on GITHub, but thankfully you don’t have to compile it yourself.
- Navigate to the Visual Studio Code Website in chromium or a different browser.
- Scroll down to “ARM build” or “ARM64 build” based on your OS and download the .deb file.
- Locate the .deb file (Usually /downloads directory) and double click on it. Click “install”. As this was downloaded from the internet, enter your password to approve it.
To run Visual Studio Code, click the upper Raspberry Pi menu, then Accessories, then “Visual Studio Code”.
Caveat: Unless you are running a RPi 4 w/ max RAM, you may have significant pauses in responsively as the CPU swaps between processes and does background indexing.
2017 Answer — Caret
The closest one I have found to Sublime Text is Caret which is free and downloadable through Chromium. Here is where to get it: Google web store.
Key features:
- Project directory saving
- Stores open files — Valuable given lots of resets on raspberry pi
- Clean (sublime-like) UI
- Dark/Light theming
- Solid code highlighting
- Multi-cursor like sublime (CTRL+D)
- Very responsive, even on a slower system
Originally published at http://hansclee.blogspot.com on February 13, 2017.
