KDevelop4 features (Was: change of maintainership in KDevelop)

[Paulo Moura Guedes]

On Tuesday 04 April 2006 09:48, Vladimir Prus wrote:
> Personally, I think that KDevelop is pretty bad when it comes to real-world
> use-cases. For example, I'm just now looking at Eclipse's code in Eclipse,
> and going to class declaration with one click, and going to list of all
> uses of a method in one click are both extremely handy, and missing in
> KDevelop.

Yes, there are some things missing that are a must have in modern IDEs:

- Go to declaration of a class/method/variable; ctrl -> click is very cool.
- Find references/usages of a class/method/variable.
- Usable code completion (with the documentation visible in a nice window)
- Refactoring
- Organize imports (aka includes for C++).
- Good MDI interface (Netbeans is very good IMHO, better than Eclipse)

- Usable outline to show methods, fields, etc, or other things depending on 
the file type (e.g., show targets for a build system file)

- Usable navigation directions. Eclipse has very good support on this. You 
revisit with great precision the places you have been, even in the same file; 
and it has a special button for "last edit location".

- Good versioning support; one thing I miss is "replace with repository" 
and... well, more things :) just look at Eclipse.

- Overide/Implement methods (showing a list of the methods from super classes, 
allowing to filter for the abstract ones)

- Generate getters and setters, constructor from fields, etc.
- Add the possibility to highlight the word under the cursor (mark 
ocurrences).

- Allow working with several projects at the same time (not so sure what are 
the implications of this).
- Out of the box support for unit tests.

- Others I can't remember right now :)

Optional
- Good job in reporting errors (difficult in C++)
- Provide quick fixes (e.g. surrond with try/catch)

I should say that KDevelop have already several great features that I don't 
find in other IDEs. I won't say what are they because I'm tired and it's not 
so useful :)

I know as a developer that sometimes it's boring to look at other tools, learn 
them, and scrutinate their features, but I think it is an vital work for 
KDevelop devs. I only tried Eclipse and Netbeans but there other IDEs like 
for e.g. InteliJ, JBuilder and Visual Studio, that might be worth a try, to 
see what is being done in the real world :)

P.S.: I also think it's essential for KDE to have great environment for 
development.

Ah, and great job with the debugger! The tree is great.

Paulo