Fwd: KDevelop: Bugs, suggestions and lots of gratitude!

[Sandy Meier]

----------  Weitergeleitete Nachricht  ----------
Subject: KDevelop: Bugs, suggestions and lots of gratitude!
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 15:13:52 +0100
From: "anakin24" <anakin24 at bigfoot.com>


Hey!
I've been using KDevelop for a few days now, and I must say: I am VERY impressed! In short, it's better than many comercial and expensive IDE's, and not far behind the rest. KDevelop is the best reason I've seen to keed KDE 1.1 installed. Keep up the great work!

I've noted down a few bugs and a list of features I'd like to see in KDevelop. I hope you'll read it and incorporate some/most/all of the suggested features and/or pass them on to the respective maintainers:

 * Curses - does not work! Executing a curses program within KDevelop just  produces the "press enter" promt. KVT seems thin on curses, too! 
 * C++/ directory name - hangs computer completely. I had projects stored under
~/doc/programming/C++. When using commands that added files (Add to project, new file, new class etc.) my whole linux box would go down (!!!) with no repsonse from the mouse or keyboard. Big trouble, in other words. Renaming C++ to Cpp solved the problem, though.
 * Editor word wrap into empty lines etc. Play around with the editor and it's word wrap. It's not perfect. If I have a line with an empty line following it, wrapped words at that line will go into the blank line, not a new line. Also, indentation gets really screwed up some times if I use tab in the middle of a multi-line statement so that words wrap.
 * Fix swallowed apps for Non-KDE (maybe not possible...) - Swallowed apps does not appear to work outside KDE - not in E or WindowMaker at least. The same happen with kdeconfig and other apps that swallow each other
* In the Qt docs, pictures, screenshots etc. are not shown.

Now for the suggested features:

 * Distribution - remove Kdevelop stuff from files to create "Finished" copies of files - easier use of projects in other contexts + more detatched from KDevelop. This could, for example, be an extra feature of the build->make source-tgz etc. options. This should remove all macros in the Makefile* and other files retaining to KDevelop and remove the project file. Also see the next suggestion:
* CXXFLAGS etc. set like this: "% CXXFLAGS="..." ./configure". Not a good idea, as this breaks when a user types ./configure in the project dir. This might go well for normal compiler options, but will cause big trouble with, for example, -D flags. Add CXXFLAGS="..." to Makefile.am instead! Remove stuff from KDevelop::slotBuildConfigure() and add to CProject::updateMakefileAm(). At least get an option to make some/all options "hard-coded" into Makefile.am. This also goes for LDFLAGS and other options set in project->options.
 * Button to load+switch to header/cpp if available, "jump to declaration" 
 button also work as "jump to definition" when cursor is in .h file.
 * Tabbed list of open files of the type of the selected main tab (cpp or h - not docs etc.) at the bottom (like HomeSite) (maybe - could get cluttered)
 * Allow tool menu progs to get at e.g. current edited file, app executable 
etc. through variables (e.g. %current_file%, %executable% or something similar) when specifying tools menu apps' arguments - for example to allow outside editors, execution in other terms, use of external debuggers etc. etc. etc.
 * More detailed docviewer: Sub-items of Qt/KDE docs for classes + other docs (on ToDo list?)
 * Add mouse wheel support - I know the we can use imwheel etc. but native support is a plus!
 * Parse other Automake/Autoconf projects to create KDevelop projects
 * "Add file to project" option (right-click menu, project menu) that adds a newly opened file not in the project to the project- disable for files in project. VERY useful!
 * Emacs-style TAB-indent: TAB anywhere on a line properly indents this line
- ignore comments!
* Make auto-indent better! Do like emacs ;-)
 * "Open file" right-click menu item when right-clicking on a file name in the
 editor i.e: right click in '#include "file.h" gives option to open file.h
 * Add vertical line @ 80 cols (or whatever wrap length is set at) in editor (like Borland editors have ) to show where to wrap
 * Allow use of custom term (not just kvt) to execute console apps in
 
I've had a look at your source code, but since I've only just started to explore Qt (man, is that classlib good!), I'm not going to fix any of this myself - I would probably just brake the whole program!
 
Thank you for making such a great piece of software!
 
Yours, 
 Martin Aspeli