I'm on a mac and use TextMate currently. As it doesn't jump between declaration and implementation and ist mac-only, I am looking for a replacement.

Is Emacs a good choice? Does it work well with FPC?

Thanks,
Hans-Peter

In our previous episode, Hans-Peter Suter said:

Is Emacs a good choice? Does it work well with FPC?

Maybe, but what would you use as editor? :_)

Gedit, also geany. Works fine with fpc.

HTH, Holger

2010/1/10 Marco van de Voort :

In our previous episode, Hans-Peter Suter said: > Is Emacs a good choice? Does it work well with FPC? Maybe, but what would you use as editor? :_)

;-)

What do you (and/or the other FreePascal authors) use?

Cheers,
Hans-Peter

In our previous episode, Hans-Peter Suter said:

joe for small editing or textmode IDE for larger multiwindow edit work. I typically don't compile with the textmode ide though, I do cmdline that in a different window (but because I work on FPC, not on an FPC using app, I more often build the whole thing to see if there are complation errors. Different workflow)

When I use the said component also at work, I sometimes also use D2009.

I don't use Lazarus for FPC development. This is not a problem of Lazarus, but more that I don't want to often rebuild lazarus when I'm working on FPC.

I use Lazarus as my primary IDE (i have to use Delphi in windows sometimes). Lazarus is the only IDE i'm using on Mac OS X.

I use it, even if develop non-LCL based applications. The best option Lazarus has to offer is Codetools, not available in other environments

thanks,
dmitry

Marco van de Voort wrote

I don't use Lazarus for FPC development. This is not a problem of Lazarus, but more that I don't want to often rebuild lazarus when I'm working on FPC.

Why do you need to rebuild lazarus when you are working on fpc?

Btw, I use lazarus for fpc development. This is very productive. I run one lazarus with my test project and one lazarus with the compiler.

Best regards,
Paul Ishenin.

Hi, I sneak in here with a newbie question:
How to debug FPC internal code with Lazarus (or with anything)? I tried it now first time. I opened project "compiler/pp.lpi" and run it. It actually built the compiler and started it, and started printing its help to stdout, but then Lazarus said: "Oops, the debugger entered error state..." Last lines on console are:
[WARNING] Debugger: Unexpected async-record: *running,thread-id="all" [WARNING] TGDBMIDebugger: ExecuteCommand "-exec-continue" failed.

Juha Manninen

Yes, and I am using the devel version of FPC (2.5.1). It works fine for building the whole Lazarus.

Juha

2010/1/10 dmitry boyarintsev :

I use Lazarus as my primary IDE (i have to use Delphi in windows sometimes). Lazarus is the only IDE i'm using on Mac OS X.

Just installed Lazarus and it's much better than I expected. Simple things like 'navigating around' are great. Didn't (yet) debug and still call the make script from the terminal though.

What I miss, is the TextMate ability to drag a folder containing subfolders with .pas code files into the (libray) project.

Cheers,
Hans-Peter

PS: thanks also to the other suggestions! And if somebody uses Emacs I am still interested to hear about how it goes. Thanks again!

2010/1/10 Paul Ishenin :

I second that question. I'm working on the "cpstrnew" branch using Lazarus. I never need to rebuild Lazarus IDE - I only rebuild the cpstrnew compiler and RTL when needed.

2010/1/10 dmitry boyarintsev :

I use it, even if develop non-LCL based applications.

Same here, but I probably use Lazarus IDE to develop 99.9% of my work
- which is all non-LCL related projects. Actually thinking about it, the only LCL project I sometimes work on is implementing minor fixes for the Lazarus IDE itself. :-)

I don't quite understand the question.

Why is "Mac only" a problem? I use whatever is available on the platform I am on. Under Linux, I usually use Gedit. Well, except that I avoid plain text editors for development since I consider them inefficient.

Emacs is good if you don't care for consistency between applications at all. It can do anything but nothing is easy with it. It has old commands from the TTY days that are different from everything else.

How should "jump between declaration and implementation" work? That sounds like the kind of functionality that requires the program to parse the file contents a lot, which rules out any editor that doesn't have an explicit Pascal mode that is FPC compatible.

/Ingemar

Yeah, I tend to use gEdit for editing just about every text file I have to edit. Even under Windows.

Hans-Peter Suter wrote

PS: thanks also to the other suggestions! And if somebody uses Emacs I am still interested to hear about how it goes. Thanks again!

I use Emacs most of the time to edit my Pascal (and all other :) ) code. But it has it's learning curve. And, although there are various code-completion and code-browser features, not much Pascal-specific support is available (e.g. no Pascal on
http://cedet.sourceforge.net/languagesupport.shtml). So you end up using generic code completion (e.g. by dabbrev, or
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AutoComplete), which is very dumb compared to how Lazarus completes.

So if you want code features that need integration with Pascal code (code browser, code completion etc.), go with what everyone says: Lazarus :)

Michalis

It took me a couple years to take that plunge (of course a couple years ago Lazarus was not as robust as it is today) but I will never go back!

Lazarus does have the distinct disadvantage that it's cumbersome to work on multiple , e.g., if I want to test some
feature or idea in a new little project, I tend to just do that in a separate editor rather than opening another group of lazarus windows or closing the big project I'm working on.

Some of the most valuable hotkeys for me are ctrl-click on an identifier to jump to declaration; and the same can be done with ctrl-shift-up. To go down to implementation, ctrl-shift-down (codetools commands - find procedure method). I've also customized other hotkeys, e.g. moving from tab to tab, which make the source editor feel more like other editors. The customizability coupled with the great codetools features are unmatched.

~D.

Hans-Peter Suter wrote

2010/1/10 dmitry boyarintsev : > I use Lazarus as my primary IDE (i have to use Delphi in windows

sometimes).

For such use case, there is the build file and run file functionality. See also:
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Tutorial#The_Run_sub-menu http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/IDE_Window:_Configure_Build_file

Vincent

I do my Pascal development using GVim and tag files generated with Exuberant Ctags. I am underwhelmed by the support for Pascal as a language relative to ones like the C languages that are tied to the history of the Vi editor family.

Exuberant Ctags will generate a tag file for classic Pascal code, but only stand-alone functions and procedures are supported. There is no support for generating tags for variables of any kind. Also, there is not support for object oriented Pascal. This is what I mean by stand-alone functions and procedures. Any use of dot notation with functions or procedures is ignored. Better support for prioritizing IMPLEMENTATION versus INTERFACE sections would also be a plus.

Anyone know of any better options for navigating Pascal source code from a classic or general purpose programmer's text editor? Ideal would be a better way of generating tag files. I don't suppose anyone has considered getting Cscope to work with Pascal source code?

[...] I don't use Lazarus for FPC development. This is not a problem of Lazarus, but more that I don't want to often rebuild lazarus when I'm working on FPC.

You don't need to.

Mattias