Re: IDE

[David Ghandehari <iffy@uclink4.berkeley.edu>]

Ian Crawford wrote:
> > 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?
> 
> 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.

Since someone mentioned VI, I had to just mention how I use XEmacs... :D
XEmacs has syntax highlighting, indenting, all that... plus it has it's own interface for make and
gdb.  It's basically an IDE in itself.  Of course, it's perhaps the most bloated program ever, but I
dig it.  I have two frames open, one for a .h file, one for the .cc file, and the lower half of one
frame for compile output.  You can click on error output from GCC and it'll jump you to that file,
and all sorts of stuff like that.  It also has an easy CVS interface, and probably a lot of other
crap which I don't use.  God himself knows only about half of the Emacs key bindings.  I find XEmacs
nicer than Emacs, but you could probably make them behave very similarly with some configuration
time.

I have to say, I just use debug output more often than GDB...  but DDD is REALLY nice...

It's funny, I first started using XEmacs because it was the only thing I could find that supported
POP mail (this was netscape 1.2 time, and I couldn't figure out PINE).

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