I’ve been using NetBeans for my mod-atom work for a while now, and while it was better than Emacs, the C support has still had a way to go.
In particular, the March 7th pre-6.1 snapshot fixed a lot of my irritants:
Apache-style indenting works, it sorts out the complicated snarl of
#include files properly, and the new-project
dialogue is easier to understand.
Now autocomplete knows all the included names, not just my own. Pity C doesn’t have Javadocs; Doxygen hooks maybe?
The Apache httpd culture tends to a relatively small number of relatively huge C files. I’ve gone along. The feature that tempted me away from Emacs is the Navigator; you just hover over this little button and this thing pops up... a really nice way to navigate around a big honkin’ C file.
For my next trick, I have to get this thing to debug httpd with my dynamically-loaded module, which is pretty hairy even from the command line. It wouldn’t work previously, but on a recent trip to the Mothership, I tracked down the actual developer whose problem it is, and he says it should now. But if it doesn’t, Gordon will be hearing from me.
Now that NetBeans is working a little better, and the OOXML process is about done, my excuses for avoiding the boring (but important, I think) mod-atom work are fading away.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Harvey Swik (Mar 11 2008, at 21:59)
Since you're already trying different editors, have you considered Eclipse or Xcode?
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From: Stuart Dootson (Mar 12 2008, at 03:45)
It's interesting to see the current state of IDEs on platforms other than Windows. My current C++ IDE of choice is VS(2003, 2005 or 2008) with an add-in called Visual Assist. And it's Visual Assist that gives me the features you mention from NetBeans, as well as a documentation style one - it'll display a comment field for a fundtion in a tool-tip (see http://www.wholetomato.com/products/features/hover.asp).
As for the debugging...well, I can think of several ways of doing that under VS/Windows (if httpd & mod_atom were built with VS):
1) Compile a DebugBreak(); into the extension and rely on JIT debugging to take you into VS (yuk, to be honest)
2) Attach to a running httpd from VS and set a breakpoint on mod_atom
3) Tell the mod_atom.so project that it should debug by running httpd.
If there's one development thing that Windows does do well, it's support for debugging (IMO).
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From: Noah Slater (Mar 12 2008, at 06:27)
FWIW GNU Emacs can do code outlining too:
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacsCodeBrowser
http://ecb.sourceforge.net/screenshots/index.html
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From: sztywny (Mar 14 2008, at 05:52)
Imenu can do something similiar in Emacs:
http://cc-mode.sourceforge.net/src/cc-menus.el
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