Any need of 3rd party IDE or Plugin after Installing ESP-IDF

[mkumar2789]

Hello,

I'm beginner on ESP-32, as I found ESP-IDF is for advance Embedded development against Arduino.
As I prefer ESP-IDF environment, so I successfully installed setup for my ESP32 DEVKITV1 (ESP-WROOM-32) in given link:
https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp ... index.html

and successfully build, flash and monitor on Terminal.

My question is:
Is there any need of 3rd party IDE or Eclipse Plugin after Installing ESP-IDF (with above link) or these options are optional!
Should we build our code via terminal only? I mean what is all about, when I need any IDE or plugin or when or how I use ESP-IDF?
And is it good and handy platform i.e. ESP-IDF via terminal for big projects?

There may be some stupidity in my question as I couldn't understand all about ESP environment.
Please answer me, as I can understand all about ESP-IDF, IDE, Plugin and all, as I prefer official platform for advance embedded development with good control over it.

Thanks.

[ESP_Sprite]

You can happily use ESP-IDF from the terminal, there are a fair amount of people who prefer it that way and you can access all esp-idf features that way. If you'd rather have something more graphical, we have Eclipse and VSCode IDE support as well, and third party IDE support is also available here and there.

[mkumar2789]

Thanks for your reply.

Now I just want to clear a few points in between using IDE and terminal (No IDE), please help.
As of now, I found that we should avoid IDEs for independent development as IDEs need a paid license and are not available for all OS (Windows, Linux, macOS) and its library varies over different OS platforms.
As Espressif provides free IDE integration with Eclipse and VSCode and third party IDE as well on all three platforms (Windows, Linux, macOS) and also provides a universal library over different OS platforms (if I'm wrong somewhere, please correct me).

So my question is:
Why should I choose ESP-IDF with Termina over IDE for advanced embedded development? as IDE's editor and graphical view gives me a good facility to see my code with more readability and productive manner. I can easily configure things, view tasks, see/ configure more related parameters, do debug code, do task based stack analysis, do many more things related to code and I can learn and understand new things with a minimum learning curve.

For example, As I have an option to go with a Car or Walking alone to travel one state to other state so I would prefer a Car to travel for reaching my destination earlier than waking and with Car's other facility to safe my self with any kind of weather (sunny, rain etc.).
So would I miss something big here, if I choose Car (like IDE) instead of Walking (like ESP-IDF with Terminal).

Please clear my doubt to tell me the benefits of using ESP-IDF with Terminal over IDE which I couldn't figure out so far and limitations of using IDE for advanced embedded development.

[ESP_Sprite]

Nowadays, IDEs aren't only paid anymore: both Eclipse and VSCode are free. For if you should use them: It's purely preference, you can do the same thing from command line and with an IDE; if you think an IDE is better for you, go for it! (For what it's worth: I prefer the non-IDE route as it's a layer less on top of the compiler and makefiles, so one less thing that can break; furthermore I've been using the terminal for decades now so I'm likely faster at it than with an IDE.)

[mkumar2789]

Thank you for your wonderful response.

I'll go with ESP-IDF with a terminal as I found most developers (as like you) prefer this over an IDE environment then I will get to know its benefits.

So, as I went through this link below:
https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp ... index.html
and successfully built, flash and monitor, existing "hello_world" example.

Is there any link (which I missed, if not there please add) to create a fresh program or "hello_world" program from scratch (not like a copy-paste existing example) with all it's dependent basic configuration.
And how a beginner can start coding over ESP-IDF Terminal, which editor chooses, how to work on it etc. (all basic operations) . After that we can take a reference from API and can use it in our program with good understanding.

[ESP_Sprite]

Wrt stating a new project: idf.py has a 'create-project' command that may help you, although I find myself copy-pasting existing projects fairly often as well. For an editor, I have no advice for a beginner... most people probably use what they're used to (vim/emacs/notepad++/mcedit) but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good point to start with in 2021.