FOSDEM Interviews On Free Development Tools

FOSDEM writes "The Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting folks, aka FOSDEM, have just released the second part of their speakers' interviews. These interviews are dedicated to their development tools track, with Andreas Zeller for ddd, Benoit Minisini for Gambas and Alexander Dymo & Harald Fernengel for kdevelop. Previous interviews were already discussed on Slashdot here"

Re:C++ autocomplete...

[Frymaster]

When will we see C++ autocomplete support in free tools at least equal to Visual Assist?

maybe i'm blowing smoke out my ass (puff puff) but it seems like you can get 80% of that just by using vim. let's look at the feature list from visual assists website:

• Enhanced Listboxes no
• Suggestion Lists ctrl p and ctrl n in vim will auto complete and cycle through all the similar options. you can set your dictionary to include a syntax file. the whole skinny on that is here [sourceforge.net]
• Enhanced Syntax Coloring i don't know how "advanced" the coloring is... but vim certainly allows you to write some pretty "advanced" syntax files
• Goto well, there's bookmarks in vim. that's similar.
• Underlining of Misspelled Words there's a swell spellchecker for vim here [vim.org]. it "highlights" mispelled words... which may be as good as "underlining".
• Auto Recovery. vim does a fine job of recovering (see here [vim.org]) i don't know how "auto" you need it.

Take also a look at Widestudio

[Anonymous Coward]

Here [widestudio.org] : free (speech and beer), multi platform, multi language, own object library, GUI builder, etc. Looks really promising.

Re:About smart editors

[BenjyD]

Precisely. I think there is a lot of macho posturing over programming tools, but if something can reduce the amount of state I have to hold in my head while coding, it's very useful. Of course, the tools can become a crutch - I really struggled going from Visual studio to emacs, because I was used to having everything laid out for me - but for an experienced developer that's not an issue.

The only problem I found with both Kdevelop and Annjuta was that they didn't cope well with annotated function declarations, which rendered their auto-completion and class views useless to me. I use the annotations to define which code segment a function should be in for multi-segment PalmOS apps (Damn 16-bit pointers).

SharpDevelop

[Anonymous Coward]

Check this out... See if it meets your needs:

http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/ [icsharpcode.net]

Works pretty well for me....