Gerhard H�ring wrote : Emacs is just another program with lots & lots of functions I do not : need - too bloated for me (I've had enough fatware on Win95! and I : want to learn Ada, not ELisp plus dozens of new commands) . . . If you want to keep things simple and easy, why not use gnatmake? Just write your code with your favorite text editor. Then all you have to do is aim gnatmake at your root procedure and pull the trigger: gnatmake foobar That's all there is to it. Gnatmake will find all the dependencies and handle them automatically. Just want to do a quick check without generating code? gnatmake -c -gnatc foobar Gnatmake is part of GNAT, therefore you already have a copy of it.