Re: [Mingw-users] A win32 IDE to work with minGW ?

[Ross B. <Ross@CheshireEng.com>]

Sometime on 2/6/2009, Guillaume BRAUX wrote:
 >....
 >I would like to know if you would know a windows IDE which is 
"mingw
 >compliant", so I can stop using notepad to edit source code .

There are a lot of choices out there. From your requirements, you
aren't looking for an IDE so much as a programmer-friendly source
code editor. Editor selection can be intensely personal.

Personally, I use a commercial editor called Epsilon[1] that was
strongly inspired by early versions of Emacs. It does code
coloring, name completion, spell checking, powerful searches,
will invoke make, and can parse the error messages from the
compiler to show the relevant source line.

There are several ports of Emacs that run well in Windows,
including GNU Emacs[2]. Any of those will do everything that
Epsilon does and more. Most are free, as well.

Eclipse with the CDT[3] is also a viable option, but be aware
that out of the box it really wants you to use its internal
project management and build system. Projects based on an
external Makefile are possible, but it didn't work well for me
when I tried it. On the other hand, its integration with CVS and
the like is excellent. I personally had some issues getting it to
recognize my mingw installation and use the right toolchain, but
once that was worked out it did work as advertised.

For those who prefer vi over Emacs, there is vim[4]. It is well
supported on Windows, and also interacts well with an external
build via make.

For debugging, gdb works as well at a CMD prompt with MinGW
installed as it ever does from a shell prompt on any *nix box.
There are GUI front-ends for gdb but I haven't found one (or
looked very hard, either) that I like for use on Windows. From
what I've seen of it, DDD[5] is really powerful and pretty if it
were available. Another frequently mentioned is Insight[6].

The cygwin build of gdb (I have GNU gdb 6.8.0.20080328-cvs
(cygwin-special)) supports a -w command-line option that launches
a built-in GUI that seems to depend on Tcl/Tk. The MinGW gdb I
have here (GNU gdb 6.7.50.20071127) claims to also have that
option, but it has no effect.

[1] http://www.lugaru.com/
[2] http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs.html
[3] http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/
[4] http://www.vim.org/
[5] http://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/
[6] http://sources.redhat.com/insight/

Ross Berteig                               Ross@CheshireEng.com
Cheshire Engineering Corp.           http://www.CheshireEng.com/