I am a first year Comp. Sci. student and am looking for the best way to develop C++ on a Mac. I have Xcode and Textmate.
What are the benefits/negatives of each? Are there any better ones?
I am not a fan of having to use a whole project to run programs with Xcode. Is this the only way to do it, or am I mistaken?
Also, is there a way to change the default text that is included in a .cpp file in xcode?
I almost exclusively use Textmate, but to be fair the decision to switch to Textmate (coming from codewarrior in OS 9 days), was mainly because the XCode editor (then named ProjectBuilder) was annoyingly slow at editing larger files.
I'm sure that changed a lot over the years, but I see no reason to switch so I don't.
That said, one thing where XCode really outshines Textmate is the integration of a debugger, when you're just starting to learn, I think having an integrated debugger will help you quickly understand what's going on with your code, and will be a great advantage...
If you've got Textmate, just try em both for a few months, you're a student anyway, you should have plenty of time