devcpp, code::blocks, psppad, notepad++, Eclipse etc...

[Alexander Neundorf]

Hi,

today once again I was looking for some kind of programming editor/IDE under 
Windows for developing embedded software, i.e. cross-compiling. Our 
buildsystem is (guess what) cmake.

So, here we go:
Eclipse: quite ok, large, slow, "indexing" has to be disabled otherwise it is 
permanently running at 100% CPU, I didn't find out yet how to specify a set 
of files to search in, only "project-wide" is possible it seems (== very many 
files)

DevCpp: probably quite nice, but I didn't find a way how to make it work with 
our existing buildsystem/makefiles. I surely don't want to trust DevCpp that 
it knows how to call the crosscompiler etc.

Code::Blocks: beside that it crashed both times that I started it after at 
most 5 minutes, I also didn't find a way how to integrate our existing 
buildsystem.

PSPad: programming editor like Kate. Seems to be usable for our purposes. Much 
faster than Eclipse. A bit crowded. Can call "make" in arbitrary directories.

Notepad++: no intelligent indenting, no way to call make. At least I didn't 
find these functions.

All of them did syntax highlighting and have some set of advanced functions.

What I want to say: 
the "Import custom makefile based project" in KDevelop rocks, it does as good 
as possible exactly what developers which already have a buildsystem want. I 
absolutely can't imagine how anybody can trust the built-in buildsystem of 
devcpp or Code::Blocks for non-trivial software or for cross compiling or how 
to import an already existing project into them.

Beside that, most of the editors/IDE have some "outline" view, which shows the 
functions/includes/class in the current open file in a list.
This is really nice and probably in most cases simply regexp-based.
Nevertheless this works really good and better than the class view we have 
currently in kdevelop, because:
-it shows only the stuff of the current file
-I don't have to click on classes to open them and see their members
-it works also on files which are not part of the project

We have something like this in Kate too, and it feels quite strange to have to 
open kate to see these things in non-project files while the big mighty 
kdevelop can't do this...

So I think with KDE4 we have a really good chance to become one of the top 
IDEs available, the only rival being Eclipse, which has the problem of being 
written in Java and such slow and very memory consuming.

Bye
Alex
-- 
Work: alexander.neundorf AT jenoptik.com - http://www.jenoptik-los.de
Home: neundorf AT kde.org                - http://www.kde.org
      alex AT neundorf.net               - http://www.neundorf.net