Re: Eclipse & gnatbench

[Britt Snodgrass <britt.snodgrass@gmail.com>]

On Mar 7, 4:55 am, "Alex R. Mosteo" <devn...@mailinator.com> wrote:
> Britt Snodgrass wrote:
> > On Mar 6, 12:10 pm, Eric Hughes <eric....@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Mar 6, 9:56 am, "Alex R. Mosteo" <devn...@mailinator.com> wrote:
>
> >> > I'm trying to evaluate gnatbench and I'm failing miserably. I have a stock
> >> > Eclipse Classic 3.3.2 freshly installed and gnat GPL 2007 installed and
> >> > well tested.
>
> >> Gnatbench requires that CDT be installed prior.  That tidbit was in
> >> one of the few bits of documentation I read about it.  Not a problem
> >> for me, as I already had it in place.
>
> >> > Gnatbench comes without any documentation I could find. Has anyone here
> >> > tried it? Care to share some pointers?
>
> >> Installation worked fine for me.  I'm not using it because,
> >> apparently, it has no way of dealing with alternate source naming
> >> conventions.  I don't use GNAT's default ".ads" and ".adb"; I can't
> >> discriminate between them quick enough on the screen.  If you're not
> >> customizing your environment that way, perhaps it will work for you.
>
> >> Eric
>
> > I have the newly released 2.1.0 version at work. Its very good. It
> > handles the Apex naming convention (i.e., *.1.ada & *.2.ada) just fine
> > if the GNATbench project's .gpr file specifies it *and* if the
> > internal Eclipse file association preferences are updated to associate
> > the .ada extension with the GNATbench Ada editor (in addition to .ads
> > and .adb).
>
> > Documentation is installed along with the plug-in and is available via
> > Eclipse's Help -> help Contents menu.
>
> Thanks, Britt. Incidentally, have you used GPS? If so, which one do you prefer?
> I'm a long-time GPS user but have never grown totally comfortable to it.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

I've only started using GPS recently.  I like it pretty well but I
prefer Eclipse with the new GNATbench.  A good thing about GPS and
GNATbench is that they can both use the same .gpr file.  I tend to use
GPS now when I want to take a quick look at a file (GPS launches
faster than Eclipse).  I usually launch GPS by either double-clicking
the .gpr file or by using a Windoze shortcut to launch "gps.exe -P
my_project.gpr"  It  doesn't make much sense to use either GPS or
GNATbench outside the context of a GNAT project file.

Another advantage of GPS is that it doesn't require a JVM and it seems
more stable. Eclipse is a little flakey and prone to sudden crashes
(unhandled Java exceptions).

My favorite general purpose text editor is TextPad 4.7.3 (not buggy
5.x).  Its fast, has a very clean interface, and its easy to integrate
all the GNAT command line tools (gnatmake, gnatpp, etc.) as TextPad
external tools.

- Britt