Despite my brutal minimalism, mod_atom is getting kind of big. The main file has a few dozen (mostly pleasingly-small) functions, and navigating around in it was starting to be a chore. I’ve been using Emacs, and I seem to recall that it has all sorts of navigation magic. But then I thought about NetBeans’ excellent “Navigator” tool, and that there’s supposed to be some new C-support code. So I installed it and it kind of works.
The Navigator was immensely helpful. It’s not perfect; for example, (see the little picture on the right) it has separate entries for functions and their forward declarations.
The indentation engine needs a few more features; I can’t quite make the code follow the Apache standards.
There’s not much refactoring there yet but, given what they’ve already got, I can’t see “Find Usages” and friends being that far away. And the autocomplete is already in pretty good shape.
It was awfully nice that when I opened up the files, they came with colour-coding to show the SVN status; I hadn’t even thought of that.
Overall, the pre-beta NB6 C support is perfectly competent and gets out of the way; I’m going faster than I was in Emacs. Heh, I’ve also filed five or ten bugs and RFEs in my first day of using the thing.
For those of us who have to spend time in the C mines, NetBeans 6 is going to be a Very Good Thing.
I suppose a piece like this isn’t complete without a screenshot; looks about like you’d expect a C IDE to.
Heh; note that the error message for ap_log_error is
completely wrong; first of all this is PUT not POST, and it’s “save”
not “same”.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Joe Cheng [MSFT] (Sep 15 2007, at 21:48)
Why not Xcode? (Or if you were on Windows, Visual C++ Express...)
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From: Tim (Sep 15 2007, at 22:44)
Joe: I'm not on Windows so Visual Studio is right out. I've never used XCode, and it & VS share a problem: they only run on one platform, and I live on lots.
But the *real* reason is: NetBeans is what I'm used to.
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From: James Holderness (Sep 16 2007, at 00:30)
FYI, you're having that inline image problem again - where it shows up as a png on the webpage, but in the feed it's a (broken) jpeg.
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From: Krishna (Sep 17 2007, at 06:54)
Have you checked out Xrefactory for (X)Emacs and jEdit? There are two versions: the commercial version supports C, C++ and Java. The free version does not include support for C++. However, it comes with all the goodies (intellisense, refactoring etc).
http://www.xref-tech.com
Cheers,
-Krishna
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