[spoiler]

The best thing that I found that works is Clion. Everything else in the ecosystem lacked polish, or ergonomic, or consistency. And Clion is lacking in these too, just not as much.

Maybe I'm setting the bar too high for an old technology? I don't know.

What IDE (or just DE) would you recommend that works well?

[ahartmetz]

Qt Creator is fine, Kate with LSP plugin is also fine. I use the latter because I prefer, well, editor-style editors. The main reason is that I prefer to do build and run related things on the console, it's more quick and flexible.

[jcelerier]

I use QtCreator. Here's my experience while editing, what do you think is missing ? https://streamable.com/xm1xw9

[spoiler]

This looks a lot more responsive/snappier than Clion. I sometimes have to wait half a minute for syntax highlighting to "catch up" (not always, so I don't understand what ails it), or for it to pick a new method/classname to appear in auto-completion results.

I'm not on my work machine now. I don't write C++ as much at my company anymore, as I was pushed into a more (regrettably), so I can't recall an example from the top of my head now. But there were definitely instances where you can pass in something, and it doesn't error until you hit the "build" button (or run a build via cli). And even then, the editor doesn't report where the error is in the "editor area", you have to read the file/line in the console.