Wednesday 21 December 2011

Help for a windows refugee

Help for a windows refugee

I'm a long term Windows developer and I have a project underway now which is modifying a linux embedded system to my own needs. The host system is Ubuntu 10.04 and target is arm using CodeSourcery tools. The code is pure C (no c++)/

The embedded sofware is complex and 'open source' so has source code rather than documentation. The system was written with vi and make over some years. The makefile pulls together a few dozen projects and tools in a pretty complex way - but it works.

So far I've been struggling along (more or less succesfully) with gvim or gedit and make. However, it's not particularly productive. The main virtue of gvim is the integration with ctags which lets me navigate the source in a helpful fashion, but I'm finding it struggle to adapt to the (for me) unusual keyboard commands.

What I want is a development environment which can

use an editor in a which which is more or less familiar to a Windows drone (gedit works here).
Run the makefile (which uses an arm compiler) and ideally navigate to any error line.
Find definitions of functions and variables (across all the libraries which are part of the project).
Ideally, find references to functions and variables and other such advanced things.
Syntax and method completion and auto prompt would be nice too, but not essential.

I've tried to use eclipse but failed to make sense of it in this context (I should be able to make a project from a makefile, but it doesn't work). I have to say I've never had much luck with eclipse, though if it worked in this context it would be good.

Any suggestions or help would be very gratefully received!

Iain

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