Invitation to IRC party

[Hugo Varotto]

I would like to include Visual Slickedit in the list of IDEs from which we 
can get some additional inspiration ( I've been using it for almost 4 years 
under Linux and Solaris ). I have high hopes that Kdevelop will be able to 
one day achieve the same quality that Visual Slickedit has now ( I believe it 
would, all the kdevelop developers are doing wonderful things ).

Let me describe the features that I believe are most useful:

Left pane is a tabbed multi-tree pane similar to what Kdevelop 2.0 and 3.0 
have now. What's very nice are the different panes inside.

1 - a list of all the open files in a tree. Hanging from each file there are 
entries ( in the tree ) for every function contained in that file and every 
symbol in that file also, including #includes, #defines, enum, variables, 
functions, classes and methods, etc. It's possible to filter which symbols to 
show. A nice touch is that a constructor has a special "plus" (+) icon on the 
left and the destructor a special "minus" (-) icon on the left.

2 - in the project pane, is possible to define different groupings of file 
according to user-defined patterns and group them together in branches of 
trees ( I believe Kdevelop uses a predefined set of patterns ). Also, it has 
the concept of "workspaces", where a workspace is composed of multiple 
projects if desired ( each of them with its own tag database ).

3 - an FTP pane: use it as a file selector and edit seamlessly through the 
network ( I believe this should be relatively simple to do with the curent 
elements in KDE ).

4 - a "classes" pane. Actually, is more of a way to look inside all the tags 
in the multiple symbol databases that are curretnly loaded. Again, a mutiple 
tree view, and grouped in branches you have packges/units, classes ( with the 
methods and parameters ), structs, includes, defines, global variables, 
global functions, global variables, static variables, etc.

5 - a file selector pane ( but I already ported the one in Kate to Gideon so 
a small step is done ;-)


The truly beautiful thing about VS is the symbol database, actually, the 
multiple symbol databases. You can have global databases, loaded at startup 
without having a project open ( I have one for QT, one for KDE and one for 
ACE loaded all the time, plus a generic UNIX database ). This databases are 
seamlessly integrated throughout all the application, providing a very nice 
environment. Later on, if a project or workspace is loaded, its own tags 
databases are also loaded and merged temporarily with the global ones. And I 
think this is where kdevelop has a lot of work to do right now, there's an 
internal classparser and some tags support, but they're not integrated 
together, they're not complete and they don't support cross-referencing ( 
more of this below ). 

The bottom panel is similar to the one currently in kdevelop ( my silent 
admiration to all the kdevelop developers again ) with two additional panes 
that are truly awsome.

1 - a symbol pane. Basically, it contains a small text box in which you can 
start typing a symbol name ( variable, function, macro ) and on the fly it 
will start searching through the database and showing the results in a list 
box in the bottom pane. Even better, if it finds a unique match for the 
current written symbol, it will display instead of the list a preview of the 
code and the line were the symbol is defined.

As a side note: I've written for Gideon a plugin that does something similar 
( on the fly symbol lookup ) using a cscope database ( without the code 
previewing ). I don'tthink I'll continue working very much on it 'cause it's 
a third database and also becuase cscope doesn's support to well C++, but if 
somebody is interested, send me an e-mail and I'll sen you the code, or I can 
put it somewhere in my web page.

2 - also using the same pane, you can just click with the mouse on s ybol in 
the edit window, and it will try to do a symbol lookup and code preview in 
the bottom pane ( only if the symbol window is currently selected ). This is 
very useful if you're trying to see what the hell is a function doing while 
analyzing a calling funcion.

3 - third and last item, crossreferencing symbols. It's aother bottom pane 
that's splitted in two. You also enter a symbol in a text box, and will show 
a tree on the left with files and functions that reference that symbol, adn 
will preview on the right side the code and line where that symbol is 
reference.

Besides autocompletion, code folding, and function helper, other nice things 
about VS is that everything is customizable. It uses an internal language 
Slick-C to actually create the IDE, but I believe Gideon has the potential of 
doing something similar with its Python support. 

On the other side, kdevelop has things that SlickEdit doesn't have: internal 
debugger suport, internal java debugger ( I haven;t tried it yet ), internal 
HTML documentation browser, Designer support ( but I work on embedded systems 
so it's not so important to me ). Also, there're no wizards in Sickedit. I 
dream to have time one of these days to sit down and write some ACE wizards 
for Gideon. Some ACE integration would be very nice.

I also agree with Eray Ozkural (exa) that Source Navigator is very nice ( the 
xref mode is something out of this world ). At work I deal with code that has 
more than a million lines of C/C++, and I found that I need both VS and 
Source Navigator to have a grasp of most of it. I guess is no secret that I 
find the symbol databases/cross referencing capabilites of these two products 
to be the most useful and intriguing for me :-).

You can download a demo copy of VS at www.slickedit.com i you want to look at 
it more. Don't take me wrong, I truly hope that kdevelop will surpass 
eventually VS in most of its features.

Keep up the good work guys. I'm very new to this list, but I'll try to help 
the most that I can with whatever little time I have. Hope my comments were 
useful and not only the result of somebody who should be sleeping 4 hours ago.

Best wishes,

Hugo




On Wednesday 17 October 2001 21:42, you wrote:
> On Wednesday 17 October 2001 22:20, you wrote:
> > On Thursday 18 October 2001 02:35, you wrote:
> > > > sniff++, source navigator, MS visual studio *gasp*.
> > >
> > > to you have the features lists of those?
> >
> > Ahem. Well, I think they do have some feature lists in their docs, but it
> > wouldn't be very quick to find them. Let me look at their documentations.
> >
> > I've got all of them installed.
> >
> > Thanks,

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