> Xmake has Clion/IDEA, vscode, vs, sublime and qtcreator plugin.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a quick search for Clion's support for xmake only returns a dead plugin from intellij which was last updated 4 years ago.

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/10156-xmake

Meanwhile, Clion is built around cmake. Why would any Clion customer want to drop first-class support for cmake to fall back to an unmaintained plugin that seems to be abandonware?

But they are not officially supported plugins, while CMake has official support from major companies and IDE makers, namely Microsoft, Jetbrains, Qt Company. Further comments in this threads also pointed out that some Plugins for Clion are abandonware and may no longer work.

A reason for using Cmake is that this build system's CMakeLists.txt also works like a universal IDE-agnostic project file that saves the user from wasting time tinkering IDEs and lots of XML files in the case of Visual Studio MSBUILD building system.