With this year’s first update, CLion 2018.1, you get enhanced C++17 support, new CMake actions, various editor improvements, and a more responsive editor.
Windows users can benefit from support for Windows Subsystem for Linux, which makes it possible to compile, run, and debug Linux-compatible binaries while working on Windows, and even run them with Valgrind Memcheck.
If your project requires a Linux toolchain while being developed on Windows, you can now use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in CLion running on Windows.
Configure WSL and the corresponding toolchain under Settings | Build, Execution, Deployment | Toolchains, and then you’re ready to use it in CLion. Header search paths on WSL will be used, and the Linux binary will be created for you to run and debug on WSL.
Learn more
Valgrind Memcheck can detect dozens of memory errors and leaks and is now available for Windows users on WSL.
Turn on a WSL toolchain, make sure Valgrind is detected in settings (Settings | Build, Execution, Deployment | Valgrind), and then compile and run regular and test targets under Valgrind Memcheck to detect possible errors and leaks. View the results in a special tab in the Run tool window.
C++17 introduced structured binding – a convenient and compact way of binding a list of identifiers to a set of objects. CLion’s C++ language engine now supports this feature and ensues accurate code analysis for it.
The ternary operator is now handled correctly in CLion’s code analysis. This means many false warnings and errors are no longer thrown, such as:
std::out is used in the ternary operator
Refactoring hierarchies can be tricky, especially if you introduce a change in a derived function. To make it reliable we made sure that the Rename and Change Signature refactorings update functions in all inheritance branches, including sibling functions.
Now you can provide options to some Clang-Tidy checks (e.g. modernize-use-nullptr) in CLion, under Settings | Editor | Inspections | C/C++ | General | Clang-Tidy.
If you prefer .clang-tidy config files instead of the IDE-provided settings (for example, because you store these config files in a VCS for the whole team to access and use in various IDEs), you can configure CLion to respect your existing per-directory configs.
Now you can collapse/expand control statements (like if/else, do/while, for, or switch) with a code block that’s longer than one line, or with a code block inside braces. Just use Shift+Ctrl+Period / Ctrl+= You can also hover the mouse over the folded block to preview the content.
With v2018.1, you can decide if build output is always necessary (and thus should be visible) or it’s only needed if some warnings or errors appear. Look in the Messages tool window settings for these options:
Keep track of your location in C and C++ code with the breadcrumbs – small markers at the bottom of the editor that help you navigate around your code. Right now CLion shows namespaces, classes, structures, functions, and lambdas there.
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To accurately and safely remove enclosing parts in complicated code with lots of nested statements, use Unwrap/Remove… action (Ctrl+Shift+Delete). It suggests the options depending on where your caret is and is capable of unwrapping if, else, for, while, do..while and for control statements.
If you have any CMake install targets in your project, you can call Install from the CLion’s
Run menu now. The cmake install command will be executed.
Alternatively, you can add an Install step to any of your run configurations in CLion.
While CLion still requires a CMake project to provide smart IDE features, you can now open a single file or folder in CLion which don’t have to be connected to any CMake project.
Follow the built-in notification to select and load a CMakeLists.txt file later. Call Tools | CMake | Unload CMake at any time to unbind your project from the current CMakeLists.txt.
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Create new file (Alt+Insert) now provides an option to create a CMakeLists.txt file.
The content of the generated file is defined by the template in Settings | Editor | File and Code Templates, so you can customize it based on your project’s or team’s needs.
CLion 2018.1 brings several predefined scopes which can help overview your project from different angles, like Project Source Files, Project Non-Source Files, and Changed files.
You can also configure custom scopes, for example a scope that only includes project header files.
Learn more
By default, Project View opens the Project, which includes all project files including the generated folder (like cmake-build-debug) and other excluded folders. Later, you can select between other predefined or custom scopes.
To narrow down your search and thus make it quicker and more efficient, use scopes in the Find in Path dialog. All custom scopes created earlier are available in the list.
Want to commit only the selected changes from files and leave others for later? Partial Git commits (git add -p) can help here, and now there is support for them provided by CLion here!
To include code chunks in a commit, use the check-boxes in the Diff pane of the Commit Changes dialog.
While editing a file, you can see change markers in the left gutter. These not only let you overview the change and roll it back, but also move it to any existing changelist or create a new one and add the current code chunk to it.
Learn moreWork with files in Objective-C / Objective-C++ added to your CMake project and benefit from the following features (courtesy of AppCode) bundled into CLion:
Fortran plugin comes with FORTRAN 77 / 90 / 95 / 2003 and 2008 support. The capabilities include smart editor, navigation actions, code analysis and debugger.
Rust plugin comes with:
There are dozens of other useful enhancements in CLion 2018.1. Find out more in our blog.
List initialization is a standard way to initialize an object from braced-init-list since C++11. In CLion 2017.3 the support for this language feature was reworked, including fixes for many of the incorrect code analysis warnings. For example:
Name lookup is a C++ standard procedure to associate a name with the declaration. This release fixes the situations when the procedure failed in CLion:
using in some cases
CLion 2017.3 correctly increments __COUNTER__ macro value, that means invalid “duplicate declaration” errors are now removed. Quick Documentation (Ctrl+Q) popup in place of the __COUNTER__ macro usage will show the final substituted value.
Generate Definitions (Ctrl+Shift+D) creates missing implementations for the functions. And now it respects function templates as well.
Besides, Generate function from usage (Alt+Enter) now respects template parameters.
While Microsoft Visual C++ compiler support is still experimental, CLion brings support for some specific MSVC extensions:
__alignof and __unaligned keywords,__ptr32 and __ptr64,%I32 and %I64Find a full list on the blog.
JUCE is widely used to develop multiplatform audio applications. CLion 2017.3 comes with multiple fixes to the JUCE library support to avoid various incorrect code analysis warnings and allow proper navigation through the code.
Besides this, with a fresh JUCE 5.2 update, you can use CLion/CMake exporter in Projucer and start developing your audio application with CLion even faster!
Watch the demo.
One very common refactoring pattern is to invert the condition in the if clause and flip the
if-else blocks. This can help simplify complex code that uses multiple nested if
statements.
Follow this pattern with CLion support now – the corresponding intention will invert the if
clause for you.
CLion now comes with the memory profiling on Linux and macOS platforms – Valgrind Memcheck integration was introduced in v2017.3. It lets you run targets with Valgrind Memcheck and then get the results in a special tab in the Run tool window. Users can run both regular targets and unit tests targets with Memcheck.
Learn more
Boost.Test, the second most popular unit testing framework used by C++ developers on a regular basis, is now available in CLion along with Google Test and Catch/Catch 2. The support includes:
The left gutter in CLion is used to help with navigation through the code, VCS changes, and more. Now it also shows special run icons to Run, Debug or Run with Valgrind main functions and unit tests.
For unit tests, these icons also report the status of the tests: success or failure.
Learn moreThe multiple toolchains support in v2017.3 means it is easier to set compiler configurations, different versions of CMake/compiler/debugger for different projects and configurations, and that there is a simplified switcher for toolchains on Windows. The new settings are as follows:
In File | Settings | Build, Execution, Deployment | Toolchains you can now configure several toolchains, selecting various CMake executables, compilers, and debuggers. On Windows, create different toolchains for MinGW, Cygwin, and Microsoft Visual C++ compiler configurations.
Select from these toolchains later in CMake profiles to apply different toolchains to different configurations.
CMake profiles are created per project and can be used to easily switch between Debug/Release configurations, and to use different Toolchains in one project, etc.
Create CMake profiles in In File | Settings | Build, Execution, Deployment | CMake, set the build type, CMake options, environment, and other settings, select toolchains from the list of configured ones.
To easily switch compilers on a project, or to use several different compilers for Running/Debugging different targets, use Toolchains. You can either rely on a compiler/Make detected by CMake or select a custom one.
Note, CMake options -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER and -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER take precedence over these
compiler settings.
Select the necessary CMake Profile in the run configuration switcher on the toolbar. A typical case is Debug/Release build types configured via two different CMake Profiles.
The switcher is also available in the Run/Debug configuration switcher popup that opens via Shift+Alt+F10 for Run and Shift+Alt+F9 for Debug.
The color scheme settings for C/C++ were updated to distinguish function calls and function declarations. In In File | Settings | Editor | Color Scheme | C/C++ you can now find separate settings for these two options.
For example, you can make function declarations bold and keep function calls in regular font.
Clang-Tidy is a powerful code analysis tool that provides dozens of valuable checks and quick-fixes. Now you can benefit from it in CLion – it works as you type, and shows messages the same way as CLion’s own built-in code inspections. Clang-tidy quick-fixes are similarly available via Alt+Enter.
Clang-Tidy incorporates lots of valuable checks. Among them are C++ Core Guidelines checks (use -*,cppcoreguidelines-* to run only these), modernize C++ code checks (-*,modernize-*), and many others.
Make the IDE run only the checks you really need. To configure this easily, go to C/C++ code inspections settings Settings/Preferences | Editor | Inspections | C/C++ | General | Clang-Tidy). Clang-Tidy command line format is used in the text field. The default configuration can be found here.
Besides, from a context menu you can disable individual checks or suppress the check for a particular line via // NOLINT.
Clang-Tidy is easily extendable, with a convenient API for writing new checks. Add your custom checks to Clang-Tidy, provide a path to the Clang-Tidy binary in Settings/Preferences | Languages & Frameworks | C/C++ and get your checks immediately in CLion.
For custom checks, please, be sure you are using Clang-Tidy version 6.0.0+ or any other version, but with patches from JetBrains applied (patch D35349, patch D34404).
Focusing on correctness, CLion 2017.2 improves its C++ code analysis across the board. For example:
std::enable_if is usedva_* macros was added
Even when variable is unused, constructor might still have some side effects. A new quick-fix was added to preserve non-trivial constructor call on unused variable.
CLion’s intentions and quick-fixes in C++ code suggest C++ type casts (static_cast, dynamic_cast, reinterpret_cast, const_cast) instead of C-style casts.
C++17 is now available in the list of standards in the New Project wizard.
CLion will automatically add set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 17)
to the CMakeLists.txt generated for new projects.
Precompiled headers are now supported for MSVC as well. Learn more
The Disassembly view is shown in CLion when sources are not available when debugging with GDB. To get into disassembly code, now you need to use a special action, Force Step Into (Shift+Alt+F7). The usual Step Into (F7) will simply skip all frames without sources.
To reduce timeouts during array evaluation while debugging, CLion uses a limit of 50 array elements shown by default. If you need elements with big indexes and clicking expand is not an option, then simply increase the value cidr.debugger.value.maxChildren in the Registry.
Keep in mind that this may lead to increased timeouts as well.
CLion 2017.2 fixes several annoying issues with GDB driver:
Indexing times were improved in some cases. And after optimizing the parsing of the compiler predefined macros in CLion, some performance improvement during the reindexing was achieved as well. Besides, in some cases it’s just about giving users more control:
Go to subclass and Go to overridden functions actions may take significant time as they build a list of available options to navigate to. To improve IDE performance and responsiveness, we’ve made it possible to cancel these navigation actions – simply click to the area out of the navigation popup window and it’s done!
To save time, it’s now possible to cancel CMake reload in order to introduce additional changes or just to postpone this time-consuming operation. To that end we’ve added a Stop button to the CMake tool window.
To distinguish cancelled and finished CMake runs, CLion now displays [Finished] in every output tab for each CMake configuration being reloaded and finished.
The Find in Path popup introduced in 2017.1 has received some UI enhancements.
The Preview panel now has a full-featured left-side gutter with navigation icons, and markers for local changes.
For your convenience, search results from the same lines are now merged together in the Preview panel.
Git Revert is now available in the Git Log view and works for any number of selected commits.
To change the commit message for a commit that has not been pushed yet, use the new Reword action.
To keep the commit messages easy to read and expressive, take care of their formatting. Updated settings allow you to control blank lines between subject and body, maximum text length, and check spelling. They are located under Version Control | Commit Dialog.
CLion now offers quick-fixes for commit messages, such as reformat or wrap lines.
CLion 2017.1 delivers support for the following C++14 features:
See the full list of supported features per standard in CLion’s online documentation.
As the C++17 standard is just around the corner and the upcoming features are being finalized, CLion starts supporting C++17 with nested namespaces.
For the sake of code readability and accuracy, CLion now suggests to modernize your C++ code by converting variable type to auto.
As this feature should be used carefully across your code base, it’s implemented as a non-intrusive intention. Use it as you see fit.
We continue to improve CLion’s parser and code analysis to make it even more accurate:
CLion now locates the precompiled headers and headers included via -include option, in order to correctly resolve symbols from such files and correctly highlight the code, navigate through it, perform code refactorings, etc.
While debugging with GDB, you can now step into disassembly code when the sources are not available. Read the assembly, which is properly highlighted in the editor, and step through it to investigate the problem.
Catch is a cross-platform unit testing framework for C++ known for its easy starting process and convenient and flexible test cases. Now you can use Catch with CLion and benefit from completion and the built-in test runner.
Experimental support for the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler is here. Check it out to avoid difficulties with MinGW/MinGW-w64 or Cygwin configuration, and especially if you use Microsoft Visual C++ as a compiler for your cross-platform C++ project.
Current support covers:
To switch on the support, use clion.enable.msvc option in the Registry.
Project model is now more user-friendly:
Run a text search across the whole project or any selected scope with Find in Path, now in a compact and more convenient popup window with immediate preview.
Refine your search through the Git and Mercurial logs in the Log Viewer with these new options:
Configure which information to display in the log viewer to make it more compact or more detailed (for example, show / hide tag names).
The Branches popup has been redesigned and can now mark important branches as Favorites.
This gives you the ability to filter the branches and show only favorites in the corresponding popup.
Several important enhancements were added to the Swift plugin for CLion:
