Ditching an IDE for hacking on Inkscape
I’ve acquainted myself with many IDE’s: Visual Studio, Qt Creator, CLion, and I’ve found it counter-productive to reconfigure projects and/or build environments within an IDE. Instead, I can use nvim, the MSYS MINGW x64 shell and environment (I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, but I have the misfortune of choosing an NVIDIA GPU, so, GNU/Windows is my mainstay). I don’t mind IDE’s if the project can be well defined within a ‘solution’ file, but even so, with Visual Studio, you may have to go through many config windows to pass the correct build flags. Other IDE’s like Qt Creator are pretty similar where you have to recreate config cache files for minor build setting changes. I feel better to forgo the latter in favour of text editors, like Notepad++ or NeoVim, even if you lose autocomplete and fancy highlighting and a nice GUI inspectors for piece-wise debugging. Building and hacking on Inkscape is going easier this way. Do you use an IDE often, or do you prefer using a special emacs setup or something similar, please share 😊 Cheers, Ben
On Thu, 23 Nov 2023 03:29:12 +0000, Ben Cottrell wrote:
Do you use an IDE often, or do you prefer using a special emacs setup or something similar, please share 😊
Emacs all the way. It doesn’t tie you to any specific build system, like many (most?) IDEs do. Also unlike conventional text editors, it doesn’t assume your files are text.
I don’t mind IDE’s if the project can be well defined within a ‘solution’ file, but even so, with Visual Studio, you may have to go through many config windows to pass the correct build flags. Other IDE’s like Qt Creator are pretty similar where you have to recreate config cache files for minor build setting changes.
This is why “meta-build systems” (as I call them) were created, like CMake or Meson; these generate control files that can be used to drive platform-specific build systems, like Visual Studio on Windows, XCode on Mac or Make or Ninja on *nix. In fact, this is the rationale behind Ninja: get rid of all the niceties that something like Make offers to aid in creating hand-written build files, and assume that there will be a front-end generator to take care of the repetitive stuff, so you can concentrate on being as simple and fast as possible.
participants (2)
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Ben Cottrell -
Lawrence D'Oliveiro