arduino ide is pretty terrible anyway. Swap to your normal ide of choice, and start using PlatformIO. way better experience, and you can actually have all your important config in normal text files on git/etc.. instead of having to tweak UI settings in Arduino studio.

Ah, good point, and likewise for adjacent comment. I was aware of those options, but have been procrastinating on making the switch. What's important to me is the library support, and ability to spin up a boilerplate project that runs on most chips, while providing access to vendor specific libraries when I actually need them.

VS Code/PlatformIO actually makes that easier than the Arduino IDE. And, as a bonus, the specific version of a library that you use is tied to a single project and won't affect any others. Which is really important when you use a library that is dependent on a particular version of another library.

this is what made me rage quit on Arduino IDE about 1 hour after starting any embedded dev (esp32) for the first time. I've got no clue what im doing with embedded stuff, but I am a SWE, and I expect to be able to test sweeping changes and have them be isolated in branches/git-stash/etc...

Having to remembering everything I played with tweaking in a UI is a hilarious no-go.

Arduino IDE shines when you're building something small and simple, where the code is at most two pages long. That satisfies a majority of the original use cases for arduino. e.g., my first use of it at work was to toggle a relay on and off once per minute to catch a problem with a new design that only happened at power-on. That was probably under 10 LoC.

However, in the intervening 15-20 years, people have been using arduino for increasingly complex applications and the basic IDE really sucks for that.

The only thing of value left in Arduino is the API (which has been ported to non-Arduinos) and the drivers (of which there are hundreds; Adafruit is one of the main developers).

You don't actually need the Arduino IDE. I haven't used it in years. You can use any IDE (or just makefiles) and gcc.

Someone needs to step up to fork and maintain it.

I imagine that Adafruit, Sparkfun and some other companies are highly motivated.

I proposed to fork the day it was acquired by Qualcomm.

Now this announcement where users get deprived of their copyright for anything they write by Qualcomm makes this fork more pressing.

Why not just use whatever IDE you prefer and upload via the CLI?

Certainly an option. The IDE is nice for beginners, which seemed like a major point to Arduino.

Get VSCode and install PlatformIO extension. Its way better

I'll give it a try. Even if it is better, that's might not help noobs since there are tons of tutorials using the Arduino one. That could change over time though.

Getting started is really easy.

https://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/integration/ide/vscode...

And esp32 can use the same Arduino library.

That's fair.