ESP-IDF is used in our documentation for
ESP-MESH development as shown in and we have some MESH examples in ESP-IDF examples directory.
The official development framework for Espressif SoC is
ESP-IDF.
Arduino IDE uses libraries that are generated by taking ESP-IDF and building Arduino libraries such as
https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32 .
As you can see, official support from Espressif and the documentation of APIs are based on ESP-IDF. There are some features in ESP-IDF that are not available in Arduino libraries such as menuconfig and configuration could be more complicated as shown in the discussion
https://www.esp32.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5669 . You can still use Arduino as ESP-IDF as component as explained in
https://github.com/espressif/arduino-es ... mponent.md
For best compatibility, we recommend to use ESP-IDF, and if IDE features are desired, we support
Visual Studio Code and
Eclipse plugin