Which IDE should I use for Vala?

Question

I think the title explains it already...

Solution 1

As @aperson said, Geany is a very good text editor - It is lightweight with lots of features. It also supports vala (you need to install valac first though for full vala features). A lot of its features are IDE like eg. you can build/run with 1 click.

To install, run sudo apt-get install valac geany or search for 'valac' and 'geany' in Ubuntu Software Centre.

Solution 2

There is new project called Valama, you can check:

https://github.com/Valama/valama

It uses gtksourceview, so editor experience is similar to gedit, but it's still in early development phase.

UPDATE: It is getting better every day, there is active development on going.

Solution 3

There are two plugins for Gedit that provide Vala support. Valencia and VTG both add autocompletion, symbol browsing and basic project management through makefiles

Valencia is the easier of the two to setup because VTG depends on gtksourcecompletion, but VTG has made several recent releases.

http://yorba.org/valencia/ http://code.google.com/p/vtg/

Solution 4

Anjuta supports vala since ver. 2.31.3 and there's a nice plugin for gedit. http://redmine.yorba.org/projects/valencia/wiki

Solution 5

I can't recommend an IDE specifically, but I can recommend Geany as a great text editor.

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Comments

[trampster]

Sorry I cant answer your question so here is an answer to a question I do know the answer to.

[Juozas Kontvainis]

I don't see the need for IDEs because text editors like geany sort of negate any of my reasons for one. I'm sorry you couldn't find my comment helpful; I feel my answer is still relevant to the question asked.

[Michael Gundlach]

IDE's are merely over-glorified text editors.

[Juozas Kontvainis]

You apparently have the better answer. I guess I need to be more informative to appease the community.

[Richard Holloway]

+1 You can't be voted down for saying Geany when the top answer so far is .. Geany. Geany rocks and I would argue that with the terminal plugin, you can use ssh / scp / ftp / svn / bzr / diff / meld etc from the command line. It has all the features you get in a "real" IDE. BTW I don't program in Vala so perhaps I should get voted down too.

[Juozas Kontvainis]

I don't care about the downvotes, what puzzles me is that my answer was the first. In any case, I love geany and it's my editor of choice. It has a great feature set and is immensely useful.

[Joseph]

How in the world can one compile all the files in the project with Vala? I know there are build/compile options, but I haven't a clue how to get them linked so I can use one file in another.

[Joseph]

Except manually editing CMake/Make/Automake projects is a pain and that alone merits an IDE. I'm a big VIM fan, but if I need project management, I'd have to go with an IDE. And that's not even taking into account the convenience of auto complete, symbol tables, real-time syntax checking, etc.

[pre-kidney]

Someone unrelated but I think your Vala blog is about to disappear unfortunately. It's been useful for me and probably others as well so it's a shame to see it go.

[Scott P.]

As of April 2020 this project hasn't seen activity in master branch for 5 years. It's dead. I'd suggest trying GNOME Builder (wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder) as mentioned below.

[Scott P.]

The GNOME developers now have GNOME Builder (wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder). NOTE: GNOME also develops Gedit.

[Felix Xu]

Geany claims to be an IDE: "Geany - The Flyweight IDE", not just a text editor