[cfe-dev] Review: CLion: a great way to develop on clang

[Richard]

Review of CLion from JetBrains, a new C++ IDE
<https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/>
(early access build CL-140.2310.6)

Hi fellow clangers,

I wanted to share my positive experiences using CLion to work
on the clang codebase.  I'm using local copies of the code checked
out from the github llvm-mirror repositories and working in my own
feature branch following a typical github workflow.

CLion understands CMake projects and even though LLVM+clang+tools-extra
is quite a pile of CMake code, CLion digests it without difficulty or
error.  The IDE itself is rock-solid, which is as I'd expect from an
IDE shell based on IntelliJ which is a very stable shipping product.

The editor, project navigator and whatnot are what you'd expect from
any IDE these days.  Some things that I found handy:

- filename completion while editing the CMakeLists.txt file
- excellent refactoring support
- excellent code navigation
- a "run configuration" already created for every executable target
  in the project.  LLVM+clang+tools-extra creates quite a large number
  of executables, but CLion makes it easy to find the configuration of
  interest by filtering as you type when selecting a configuration.

Debugger support is on a par with gdb but with a GUI view of
local variables, watch expressions, etc.  There is access to the
gdb console if you want to head straight to the debugger.

I am pretty keyboard-centric when I'm in a development session and
CLion's IntelliJ-based IDE is easy to use and allows for robust
keybinding customization if desired.  I tend to use the standard
keyboard mapping and navigate through menus, etc., by the keyboard.
CLion doesn't get in my way when staying focused on the keyboard.

There's tons more I could say, but this is already too long :).
I recommend just trying an EAP build and seeing what you think.
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