COBOL IDEs & Tools

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The reference material consulted while preparing these pages is listed in the section bibliography.

This page lists the IDEs, editors and tools commonly used for COBOL, with a link to each product’s official page. Mainframe developers usually work in VS Code or Eclipse with a COBOL language server and Zowe, while GnuCOBOL covers local development on a workstation.

IDEs

  • Visual COBOL — Rocket Software’s COBOL development environment for Visual Studio and Eclipse.

  • Eclipse Che4z — the open-source project behind COBOL language support, debugging and Zowe tooling for Eclipse Che and VS Code.

Editors with extensions

  • IBM Z Open Editor — the VS Code extension for COBOL, PL/I, JCL and HLASM on z/OS.

  • Zowe Explorer — the VS Code extension to browse and edit z/OS data sets, jobs and USS files.

Compilers

  • GnuCOBOL — the free, open-source COBOL compiler for Windows, Linux and macOS.

See also