So, I'm taking a coding course at a local coding school, learning Java right now and we're using the Eclipse IDE. Holy cow. Having only coded in the Solarus editor, all the refactoring and method extraction and being aware if a method I'm trying to call is actually valid and suggested arguments for methods, wow, everything is so easy.
Does anyone use and IDE when coding their games, or know how to get one to interface with Solarus? Or do you guys all just code in the Solarus editor and do everything by hand like I've been doing for the last couple years?
Notepad++ is a quite good choice. I use it.
PS: yes, it is not an IDE, I think.
I use BBEdit which is just a fancy text editor for the mac. Has syntax highlighting and a drop-down menu that lets you jump to another function in the same file.
I think you can get a plugin for eclipse to use it for lua.
I recommend Visual Studio Code: it's free, open-source, fast, has autocompletion, syntax highlighting, Lua plugins, Git integration, folders, etc. It is miles better than Notepad++.
I am also using Visual Studio Code. Unfortunately, you will not get the intellisense for solarus functions as you get with JAVA methods/functions.
PS. For JAVA you should try IntelliJ (not free but you can get a student license usually). It is on another level compared to Eclipse.
Also a Visual Studio Code boi. I went through Sublime Text 3 first, then Atom, and now VSCode. It's my favourite. I do occasionally use VSCode for coding in Solarus, but not all the time.
And yeah for Java related stuff, JetBrains software is really good for those. They even made a new rising programming language, Kotlin, which is like an evolved version of Java.
ZeroBrane is a good one too, and moreover a compatibility with Solarus is in the works!