Re: IDE

[Ian Crawford <icrawfor@uoguelph.ca>]

> I'm looking for opinions ( and there seem to be no end of them on this list )
> about a good IDE for programming in C/C++.  I thought about gIDE, but I'm not
> sure I want to depend on GTK, they break the whole thing every two weeks, and if
> gIDE is based on that then updates would most likely require updating GTK and
> GTKeditor every time...  a little tedious.
> I tried FTE, but it is rather counter-intuitive for me.
> Does Xemacs have syntax highlighting?
> 
> anywayz, any suggestions would help, as I am coming along on my space trading
> game and beginning to have to break it into pieces to manage it now, so projects
> and ability to run make from the IDE and all that would be good.
> and syntax highlighting, gotta have it.

I don't remember if I replied to this before, but here goes.

I do all my development with vim, make, DDD, and whatever
compiling/linking tools I need for the language(s) being used.  This is
a very complete combination as I don't feel I'm missing out on anything.

vim- http://www.vim.org :
It's name comes from Vi IMproved, and it is exactly that.  The interface
is based on vi, but vim has an endless list of new features.  These
include configurable syntax highlighting, brace matching, autoindenting,
and autolinewrapping.  You can even run 'make' from vim and vim will
perform error location for you, even if the error is in a different
file.  On the down side, it's not's the easiest editor to learn.  I
still keep the "quick" reference (7 pages when printed out using 6 point
font and 2 columns/page) within reach.

make- http://www.fsf.org/software/make/make.html :
make is, well... make.  Good makefiles are hard to write, but there is a
fantastic manual for GNU make at
http://www.fsf.org/manual/make/html_mono/make.html (Warning: this is one
big, honkin' html document.  It's around 445 KB, but other version are
available at http://www.fsf.org/manual/make/index.html ).

DDD- http://www.cs.tu-bs.de/softech/ddd/ :
DDD (the Data Display Debugger) is without equal!  I don't think that
anything I could say could actually do this amazing tool justice, so I'm
just going to say that if you're not using DDD, you're using the wrong
debugger.  All the information you need is on the web page.