I don't know of any IDE that provides even half of what i want TBH.
On Linux (which is my main OS these days) pretty much all options involve a text editor with some plugin/addon to somehow understand C plus the ability to call a makefile or some other command. Of all those Kate (KDE's "advanced" text editor) with an LSP plugin and a Clang-based LSP seems to be good enough.
Though it is really more of a "least bad" than "actually good" situation.
> I don't know of any IDE that provides even half of what i want TBH.
> On Linux (which is my main OS these days) pretty much all options involve a text editor
You obviously haven't looked hard enough.
CLion fulfills a decent amount of what you're looking for.
https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/
A lot more limited, but still much more capable as an IDE than text editors is KDevelop, for example your request here :
> (i haven't touched topics like VCS support and how i'd like to be able to see and use different version of the code from inside the IDE - like e.g. go back in time to a different function while the debugger is running - or anything that has to do with GUIs)
> An especially useful feature is the Annotate border, which shows who last changed a line and when. Showing the diff which introduced this change is just one click away!
Also example snippet of the debugging integration :
> You can also hover the mouse over a symbol in your code, e.g. a variable; KDevelop will then show the current value of that symbol and offer to stop the program during execution the next time this variable's value changes.
> You obviously haven't looked hard enough. CLion fulfills a decent amount of what you're looking for. https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/
CLion has the problem of being a proprietary program that requires online validation, which is a big hard no for me.
Also IMO the fact that you point out KDevelop being able to show a per-line commit and the current value of a variable, both being among the minimum you can expect from an IDE tell me you didn't read what i wrote that i wanted, so by extension i doubt CLion also does anything close to what i wrote.
I don't "just" expect "some" debugger integration or "some" VCS integration, i explicitly wrote things like the debugger being able to call a function in the running program or modify a function while the program is called or being able to replace the current function with an older version of the function taken out of VCS. Among a ton of other things.
What you show KDevelop to do aren't anything special, even non-IDE "programmers' text editors" can do them.
You can still try CLion (the trial version) and see if it’s what you’re after. You don’t have to use it but IMHO complaining so much about there not being a decent IDE without even trying the proprietary ones isn’t very fruitful. CLion is what Borland was back in the 90s.
The thing is even if CLion does what i want (TBH i doubt it[0]), i wouldn't use it anyway so i don't see a reason to spend money on it. Note that my issue wasn't so much that it was proprietary (though it is an issue[0]) but that it requires an internet connection to function.
After all i still have and can use Borland C++ 5, Delphi 2 and C++ Builder 1 to this day without requiring any sort of connection or having Borland's permission to use the software i bought. I can't do the same with CLion.
[0] CLion relies a lot more than Borland on external tools like GCC, CMake, GDB, etc meaning that not only it most likely does not provide all the integrated functionality i mentioned but there is also a very high chance it will stop working at some point as its dependencies are changing so you do need to rely on JetBrains to keep it up to date without having access to the source code.
Yes, though i don't remember why i decided against KDevelop, i remember installing it at least a couple of times, finding some annoyance and removing it. I do remember liking QtCreator more but that was in comparison to KDevelop.
On Linux (which is my main OS these days) pretty much all options involve a text editor with some plugin/addon to somehow understand C plus the ability to call a makefile or some other command. Of all those Kate (KDE's "advanced" text editor) with an LSP plugin and a Clang-based LSP seems to be good enough.
Though it is really more of a "least bad" than "actually good" situation.