Kdevelop 4 vs. 3.5

[Erik Rull]

Hello René,

René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> On Saturday January 02 2016 11:56:56 Erik Rull wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
>> Now I switched to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and installed Kdevelop 4 that is
>> included in this distribution.
> 
> Any reason you didn't go for 14.04 LTS? It should run fine on a CPU with 4 cores (though 4Gb isn't much for a KDE4 desktop).
> What KDevelop version are you using?

I found a machine with 14.04 installed and tried Kdevelop 4.6.0. It feels
faster, the startup at least.

>> It's horrible. The startup speed without having a project open is really
>> slow (CPU with 4 GB ram, 4 cores, SSD) and when trying to somehow import my
>> existing code (file by file, the project file is not accepted by 4) to the
>> Kdevelop 4 project structures I get it either stalled (doing nothing any
>> more) or get it crashed.
>> Well the project is not small. ~ 150k lines of code, more than 800 files (C++).
>> Is there a way to get my existing 3.5 project to 4 without killing the
>> application?
> 
> I don't understand why you have to import the project file by file. Even if it doesn't use cmake there should still be an importer for projects based on autoconf or even a simple Makefile.

The makefile is quite complex and in the main makefile the targets are not
included. Does KDevelop parse the main makefile recusively?

>> The "only" thing that I really need is the code completion and the standard
>> editor features like syntax checking + highlighting. This worked really
>> great in 3.5, but there is no install package for 3.5 for Ubuntu 12.04 any
>> more.
>> I don't need gmake and other parts of the project handling, I use the
>> standard linux shell + make for compiling the project.
> 
> I see 2 options if KDevelop 4 cannot work for you:
> - build KDevelop3 yourself, supposing you have or can get the KDE3 libraries and other dependencies installed

I thought about that already. Having a smarter solution would be the better
option :-)

> - Check out if Kate doesn't cut it for you. It sounds like it might, it does have some form of project management, and does do highlighting.

Thanks for the hint with Kate. I tried that directly on the 14.04 machine.
Looks as if this fits my needs for the first. I need to investigate that
deeper.

But: The scrolling speed is unusable. When I create a new, empty file and
enter just some lines and then some blank lines that requires some
scrolling to browse through the document, PgUp and PgDn is extremely
delayed and not really responsive.
This seems to be the same behavior as with KDevelop - I assume due to the
same base with the KTextEditor component.

Any idea on how to improve the scrolling? It's not nice to wait a second
after having pressed PgUp multiple times until the scrolling is finsished.

> Other options that involve more drastic changes would be to try Qt Creator (but you'd get an obsolete version from Ubuntu) or find a distribution based on Ubuntu (12.04) but with the Trinity desktop.

No, thanks - I would like to stay in the KDE area.

> R.

Best regards,

Erik