Alternative IDEs to VSC for Playdate Dev?

I'm a relatively newbie programmer and have been using Visual Studio Code because, well, it's practically the default and there's so much information about how to add playdate features into VSC. However I am getting very tired of VSC constantly badgering me to use LLMs, and I would like to move away from a Microsoft-owned product. I'm wondering if the community here has any suggestions for alternative IDEs that are friendly to playdate development (bonus for things like auto-complete or playdate debugging while running the simulator)? I'm on Windows.

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I have been using nvim for c sdk development and it has been fine (with clangd plugin + I added the cmake command to emit the compiler commands json). It’s quite a lot of investment to set it all up though so might not be that great if you are new to programming… but if it helps I started with the config from GitHub - nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim: A launch point for your personal nvim configuration

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I've used neovim for both lua and C development. You can literally use an ide you want because all you need to do is swap out the build/run commands and your done (or if you're like me just make different .sh files for different uses.)

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Interesting to hear multiple people say neovim! It seems like such a different style of IDE I've been a bit intimidated...but I guess that's like most new things in programming :sweat_smile: always seems scary until you just jump into it

I use IntelliJ with a Lua plugin and it works perfectly. But as someone mentioned before, you can almost use any IDE you want since the only thing you need is to configure the compiler and the simulator.

If using the C SDK, I've been using CLion by Jetbrains, it is a pretty great IDE (it does have plugins for LLM support they don't nag you)

as a resident VSCode/Cursor hater, my go-to has been Zed. incredibly performant and feels like it avoids a lot of IDE bloat.

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I've started using VS Codium recently. As I understand it VS Code is Open Source but the binaries that Microsoft give out on their website have an extra layer of telemetry and advertising etc. built in. VS Codium is a build of VS Code without that telemetry attached. You can still get most of the same extensions, although I had to build Playdate Debug from the source (although they do have a task on Github to make it available to VS Codium)

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+1 for Zed. I've been using it for Playdate dev in Swift and you can definitely feel the way that it's not a browser.

My guess would be Panic‘s own IDE: https://nova.app/

@konzeptzwei, they said they were on Windows, Nova only works on macOS.

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