Are any other IDE’s like Intellji IDEA supported for FRC? I know there’s a plugin in beta for IDEA, has anyone used it? My school is starting a FRC team for next year and we’re just looking at out options.
This year I used Atom to do any development I did and a docker environment for both build and testing. It’s not supported but it’s a text editor and the same Ant build file used by Eclipse.
The easiest and most supported IDE is Eclipse. Since you would be a new team, I suggest to start with Eclipse so you can follow the screensteps guide.
My team uses GradleRIO. It comes with all of the features of the gradle build system, such as easier dependency management, but you lose the official support from wpilib, and the interactions between gradle and intellij are definitely quirky at times.
If you are willing to spend some time to learn the gradle build system, and feel solid about your ability to code a robot before kickoff, I say you should go for it. Otherwise you probably stay in the domain of what’s officially supported for at least your first year.
I use Eclipse to download the build system but invoke ant manually to do all the building and deploying. I use IntelliJ to do the actual coding, since it is a less terrible option.
May I ask what you think is worse in Eclipse than other IDEs you’d like to use?
Unless you have a mentor who is really into one of the alternatives, it’s best to stick with one of the officially supported language/IDE combinations.
That way you have the maximum set of resources available to help.
I’m using Atom this year and a command line-- compilation basically amounts to calling “ant compile/jar/deploy” and I’m also using the build plugin to run compiles.
That said, you miss out on the templates when using Atom-- but that’s simple enough to overcome, just copy some other file from your project and rip out everything you don’t need.
Ya, I agree with this.
https://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/4485 has a lot of good instructions for rookie and veteran teams.
I use IntelliJ IDEA last year, however we had to use GradleRIO first. Which was a good choice, I recommend switching to it. Off-season, of course, it’s a big switch to do in the middle of the season.
Any novice (i.e. me) can clone their team’s repo, use git bash to run
./gradlew --refresh-dependencies build
in the repo’s directory, and then import the gradle project into Eclipse for a fully functional build & deploy right out of the box. It uses two tools software devs already likely use (git & eclipse). This supposes someone setup GradleRIO to begin with (i.e. not me) though.
I second using Intellij and GradleRIO, it’s so much better. Also, if your school offers .edu email addresses, use those to get a Jetbrains Student License and get Pro for free.
If you do want to give intellij and gradlerio a try, take a look at our wiki on the subject. It’s not much but it will get you started–and feel free to reach out with questions.
We also have a skeleton project you can clone as a starting point.
We also have a resource that could be useful in addition to the ones you posted. It converts normal projects created using the FRC project templates into Gradle projects using GradleRIO: GitHub - FIRST-Team-2557-The-SOTABots/firstant2gradle: Deprecated.