The first stable release of Arduino IDE 2.0 is now out. Based on the Eclipse Theia framework, the new IDE provides a more modern and user-friendly user interface, faster compilation time, and more features we’ll discuss in this post.
Arduino initially introduced the Arduino IDE 2.0 beta in March 2021 with a live debugger with breakpoints support, a revamped user interface with features such as autocompletion of variables and functions. After 18 months of debugging with the help of members of the community such as Paul Stoffregen (the maker of the Teensy boards), the Arduino IDE 2.0 is not an experimental software anymore, and it’s the first version you’d see in the download page.
The Arduino IDE 2.0 is available for Windows 10 64-bit and newer, Linux X86-64, and macOS 10.14 “Mojave” or newer. If you’ve already installed Arduino 1.x, it will inform you of updates for your installed libraries and boards, and you can easily have access to your existing Sketches after installation.
Let’s go through some of the new features.
There are some obvious changes in the user interface with quick access to your Sketchbook, boards, libraries, and live debugger on the left side, and auto-completion as shown above should speed up your code writing once you are used to it.
We are also told code compilation should be faster. The first build takes a little while on the new version as well, but subsequent builds are much faster with an Arduino sketch for the Seeed XIAO BLE board taking 38 seconds to rebuild on Arduino 1.8.19 against just 5 seconds on Arduino 2.0.0.
One potentially useful feature that I did not notice during the beta, or that was not implemented yet, is the serial plotter that can display data outputted to the serial terminal. The Arduino IDE 2.0 also supported dark mode, you can save your Sketches to the Arduino Cloud through the Remote Sketchbook integration making working on multiple computers easier, and last, but not least, the IDE can now update itself when a new version is available, and there’s no need to download the new version manually from the Arduino website.
The release of the Arduino IDE 2.0 does not necessarily mean you can uninstall the Arduino IDE 1.8, as while official Arduino boards should be well supported, third-party boards may still be experimental/in beta in the new IDE, as is the case for Teensy for IDE 2.0 for instance. But going forward, documentation should probably be written for the new IDE, unless it’s not working perfectly just yet.

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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