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KDE GUI

Kdevelop 1.1 is out & other KDE news 134

Posted by HeUnique from the good-progress dept.
I just got the message - Kdevelop 1.1 is out, along with KDK (KDE Development Kit), Kdbg (KDebug 1.0.2) and other goodies for you to enjoy. Also, Martin Konold from the KDE development team sent some pictures from CeBit - worth a look.
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Kdevelop 1.1 is out & other KDE news More

Kdevelop 1.1 is out & other KDE news

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  • Any lists out there that say which version of KDE is shipping with each distribution?

    --
    Offering Open Source Reward's
    http://www.OpenReward.com
  • When I first reviewed Linux for the company I work for, KDevelop was one of the two or three products that pushed this microsoft camp into the "Yeah - Linux looks good". Since I became an Old Phart, I've become addicted to IDE's.
  • KDE 1.1.2 is the latest stable version, and it's been out for a while. I think nearly every distribution ships with it.

    --

  • Excellent news, but... (Score:5)

    by dimator ( 71399 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @12:14AM (#1241459) Homepage Journal
    I'm a big fan of the KDevelop project. However, one request I would make is to have customizable code-editing widgets. KWrite is a nice widget to use, but it is simply notepad with colors -- not very many advanced features for the seasoned hacker.

    If someone could hack vim into a Qt or KDE widget, for use in KDevelop or stand-alone, then I would be impressed. Such a task seems more than trivial, now that I've tried it, because it seems the vim code is not exactly event-driven (or so I gather from some vim developers.)

  • KDE is written in C++ using the QT library from Troll Tech. Although you can write apps using C, and I'm sure other languages as well.
    treke
  • KDE uses the (C++) Qt widget set from troll [troll.no]. KDE, therefore is mostly, if not entirely, C++ based.

    KDevelop is still capable of creating C only projects, IIRC.

  • KDE is not an OS, just a GUI (graphical user interface).
  • KDE != OS :-)
  • But KDE isn't an OS, and neither is Gnome.
    They're "window managers", and nowdays, usually a bit more. Both of them also define methods of component reuse (a bit like COM on windows) and also their name generally also implies the software they ship with (kedit etc).
  • KDE uses QT which is a set of C++ classes. That's why I personally prefer KDE over Gnome.

    BTW, give KDevelop a go, it rocks, not up to the level of VC++ (which was the insipiration) but it has made AMAZING strides in catching up in a short amount of time, and in some areas, it is even better :)
  • I meant with some older distributions.

    --
    Offering Open Source Reward's
    http://www.OpenReward.com
  • KDE is NOT a window manager - you can run KDE on other window managers - it comes with its own - but you can change that..

    Also - its a full Desktop Enviroment (thats what the DE is for)

    Also, another post suggested thats it only front ends for text applications - true for KDE 1.x - but on KDE 2.0 - thats a totally different story (want to try running KOffice from command line? good luck)

  • Re:I love KDE. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    KDE and Gnome are not operating systems! They are just the kernels that allow the rest of the OS to interact with the hardware. Get a freakin' clue!
  • Sorry, but I hat the VC++ interface.

    The editor's quite nice, but the workspace panel and the output panel take up far too much screen space leaving you with a tiny window to type in. This just seems pointless. You don't need the workspace panel and the output panel at the same time.

    The last version of KDevelop was even worse in that you couldn't move these panels around. (Has this been changed yet?)

    Borland managed a very nice looking IDE. I even quite liked the Watcom one. But why should people be looking at any PC IDE? Can't linux people innovate?
  • Can someone mirror the photos somewhere other than an ftp site with a stringent user limit?

    -W.W.
  • Nice to see the good ol' KDE gear at /. after all the stuff happening in the GNOME world of late :-)

    I use both KDE and GNOME, switching between the two as my default on-and-off, but KDE has always been my favorite.... (GNOME looks better though, but KDE2 seems to be catching.) Having the choice is a great thing though...

    Kdevelop looks like it will REALLY help the KDE cause though, with apps being easier to write. Once again, KDE has the edge on GNOME...

    Anyway, this is my $0.02, so I'm gonna put on the flame suit and brace myself :-)

  • Nice interface but....the debugger (Score:4)

    by Fnord ( 1756 ) <joe@sadusk.com> on Monday February 28, 2000 @12:52AM (#1241475) Homepage
    This looks fairly nice, I haven't tried it personally but if its as close to VC++ as they say it is then its probably a decent interface to program in. I won't use it though. No matter how nice they make the editors/class browsers/project managers all these ides seem to slack on the debugger. They always have what looks like just a little arrow in the source window that follows the output of gdb, maybe a table of variables, maybe breakpoints. Nothing else. No real use of the power an integrated environment like this COULD give them. The best debugger I have ever used (on any platform) is the Data Display Debugger [gnu.org]. I've made a few converts to unix just by showing people what this thing could do. And no I'm not affiliated with the developers of this in any way, I just like the thing. So for me it's still going to be vim/xemacs (depending on my mood) ddd and a makefile for my devel environment.
  • Not EVERYONE reads Freshmeat. /. only annouces a few software releases anyway, so, who cares?

    Anyway, the geek world's been slow for news lately...

  • Re:Mirrors? (Score:3)

    by absolute ( 71745 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @12:57AM (#1241479)
    here is a mirror of the pics: http://squadron.org/CeBit/ [squadron.org]
  • that's why i suggested that today kde is usually a bit more than a window manager. certainly kwm is an important part of kde.
  • > They are just the kernels that allow the rest of the OS to interact with the hardware

    Half-truth. They are not kernel but only an important part of it.

    KDE stands for Kernel Drivers Everywhere.
  • KDE looks ok, but I've never been able to get my sound to work in it. The first Linux distro I ever used (SUSE about 2 years ago)never worked, so I didn't mess with it for a while. Now I tried Caldera with OSS sound system installed, and it don't work, and redhat 6.1 doesn't work, even though with gnome and enlightenment and works fine and dandy. Does anyone know what I need to do?

  • Re:Sound (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is a result of Redhat half arsed support for KDE. I have RH 6.1 and I got the sound working using sndconfig. However, the soundconfig puts /etc/sysconfig/soundcard file in while the kdestart script looks for /etc/sysconfig/sound . The solution: edit kdestart (do which kdestart to find out where the file is located) and search for /etc/sysconfig/sound and replace it with /etc/sysconfig/soundcard. Hope this helps (it worked for me anyway).
  • Have you ever USED VC++ or just seen screenshots and assumed it was exactly like KDevelop

    Yep. I've used VC++, Watcom, Borland Turbo C for DOS (I really liked that one) and I've even managed to shuffle the VC++ panels around so that they aren't quite as in the way.

    Now, what I can't seem to do is have the floating windows floating at the bottom of the screen. They seem to jump into a panel again. Obviously there's a simple intuitive way to make the windows float down there rather than in the middle of the screen, that I'm too stupid to work out. I'm so stupid I can't even pop the editor window out. The output panel can't be made to appear as a tab of the workspace panel. As far as I know the online help can't appear in the output window. It isn't possible to have one panel showing files and anther showing classes.

    Regardless of this, my complaint was aimed at Kdevelop which doen't let you do anything to the panels. It doesn't seem to like external editors either. Not only that, but it doesn't try to do anything new.

    I've never said that vi or emacs does everything a coder needs. The reason for this is that I don't think they do.

    Okay, I know this is still a fairly early version and this will be fixed. I also feel that this is the best Linux IDE around at the moment (There isn't really too much competition).

    The question is why are the KDE developers just looking at a single IDE? All of them have features that are worthwhile. Can't we look at all of these as well? Can't we come up with some features that aren't in any of these? Why are we still playing catchup?
  • Posted what? I got this announcment this morning (Kdevelop 1.1 was out since saturday or sunday) and I posted it (I'm a /. author) - so what are you talking about? KDevelop Beta?

  • Okay, I didn't know about pressing escape, so thanks for that.

    While I agree that there are a lot of nice features, I still don't like VC++ that much. It just seems to be configurable in just about every way except the way I want to configure it.

    Kdevelop seems to lack those features that make VC++ good and keeps all the ones I dislike. I'll still use it, because there isn't anything better around, and it does show promise. I just feel that there are better ways to design it than trying to clone VC.

    I realise I have a lot of venom towards VC++. but I don't like it and I just keep feeling that it will drive all competitors away, leaving me with no choice.

  • nice effort, but... (Score:5)

    by jetson123 ( 13128 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @02:23AM (#1241495)
    I downloaded the beta of Kdevelop 1.1. Kdevelop will make people coming from a Windows and VC++ environment really happy, since it offers a similar style of programming and GUI design. Kdevelop will also attract a lot of developers to the Qt toolkit, since it makes it pretty easy to use Qt.

    Of course, I'm not entirely sure why this is a good thing. GNU&Linux wasn't built or used by people who approached programming that way. Is KDevelop going to bring a lot of developers from Windows to Linux? What kind of changes will they want in Linux? And what will that mean to the traditional GNU&Linux communities?

    I think there is a lot of interesting stuff to be done in the traditional text-based GNU/Linux/UNIX approach to programming. Here are just some simple ideas:

    • a working command line version of cextract for C++
    • a better version of make that determines and manages dependencies among C/C++ files faster, more automatically, and more reliably than existing approaches
    • a constraint and rule-based language for specifying GUIs in your favorite toolkit
    • an SML-style module system for C (and maybe C++), integrated with a make-like facility
    • integrating the C/C++ bounds checking hacks into the main branch of GNU C and figuring out a good way of making that backwards compatible with old libraries

    KDevelop is glitzy. It's a big and impressive development effort. It's probably useful for people who want to build Windows-like applications with a Windows-like IDE. I can even see why people have fun developing it.

    But, ultimately, KDevelop looks foreign to me in a UNIX environment and less useful for traditional UNIX uses and users. I'd like to see more effort go into building tools in the traditional UNIX style (and I'm trying to help when I can).

  • More Links. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    - KDevelop announcement [kde.org]

    - KDK announcement [kde.org]

    - Press release [uni-potsdam.de]
  • You can also symlink it...

    ln -s /etc/sysconfig/soundcard /etc/sysconfig/sound

  • Great for non KDE development also (Score:3)

    by _Gnubie_ ( 14485 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @02:44AM (#1241499)
    First of all - Thank you to the Kdevelop team!. Kdevelop is imho KDE's killer app. I havent used it to program one line of C++ or KDE code, all of my code is C (openGL stuff and believe it or not I load my Glade generated code into Kdevlop for easy GTK hackng). I have OpenGL and GTK docs available in HTML format in the IDE at the simple click of a button and its easy to add more in the doc toolbar. Kgdb is a excellent frontend to gdb. It lets you view structs in a tree form (Invaluable for linked lists etc etc).

    Even if you dont use KDE its worth installing the libs just for this one app
  • How about hacking Nedit into it? Not trivial either but it is definitely event-driven and it is GPL now...
  • Oh, man... it's hilarious the way some people are totally unable to see a joke even when it comes up and hits them it the face!

    Did you really think the poster was that stupid? Did you not maybe clue in when he/she talked about using it in embedded systems???

    Lighten up, dude!

    It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
    --
    - Sean
  • Err... nevermind.

    *blushes*

    Seems that maybe I should take a bit of my own advice...

    Egg on my face for that one!

    It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
    --
    - Sean
  • <i>Now, what I can't seem to do is have the floating windows floating at the bottom of the screen.</i>

    That's an easy one. You still have the 'docking View' on. If you right click on the window and take the docking view off then you are left with a regular window. Then it no longer pops into the panels. This is how I always use it because you can fit a number of code windows on the screen at one time.

    One of my <b>favorite features</b> is the rectangular cut and paste. If you hold alt and drag, you can cut a vertical block of text. It's really useful in the work I do. This feature has been lost in many of the graphical editors of today.

    VC++ has it's bugs too, but it's a pretty good editor.
  • This is more of a question then anything else. I am consider rewriting a fairly elaborate piece of software for work. It's currently written for windows in C. One of the reasons is to give the users a User Interface that is more up to today's standards as well as increase the functionality. The logical choice that Microsoft gives is to port to C++ using MFC. The problem with this is that I don't want to shoot myself in the foot when Microsoft decides that they don't want to support MFC anymore.

    I am considering writing it using QT. Troll says that their libraries are for multiple platforms. It would be nice to write the thing in QT for Linux and compile it under Linux as well as windows. Our customer base is ALL windows because that is what the company computers are, but that will probably change in a few years.

    I guess what I'm asking is if anyone has used KDE between Windows and Linux and does it work good.
  • When you say sound, do you mean the KDE system sounds, or just any sound output at all?

    KDE System sounds don't work for me either, although general audio output works fine (I.E Xmms, Real Player etc).

    If it's "no sound at all" then it's gonna be an OSS problem. It works fine here (Redhat 6.1 at the moment, with an AWE32 compatible card). The OSS installer is quiet good, so should tell you if there are any configuration problems. If there are, it usually tells you what you need to do to fix them.
  • In my humility, I always thought that base object like 'Object' in Java is a kludge to avoid the fact that there are no templates (and standalone functions). By the way there's a base object in C++. It's spelled 'void*'.
    --
  • If you don't want the panel to dock, hold down the control key while you are moving the window around. You can place the panel anywhere you want, and it will not dock as long as you hold the control key down.

    -ec

  • oops (Score:1)

    by ari* ( 134330 )
    you missed the point of Linux and free software... Since it is free, people will do whatever they please with it, including turning Linux into a Windows-like environment. Those who disagree can simply use a different distribution. Who cares how "foreign" it is to you?
  • C++ templates allow containers to be typesafe, rather than requiring downcasts from Object as in Java
  • I'm sure any KDE extentions to QT have not been ported to windows, and most likely the QT lib's for windows do what the KDE libs would do anyway. On a side note however, there are other widget sets out there for Linux and Windows. For instances, the GDK layer (which controls all the low level mechanisms, drawing, etc) has been ported, so you could use GTK+ and probably GTK-- as well. I myself hate writing in C++, so I would go with GTK+ at least
  • Qt (NOT KDE) is an option (and a good one at that) for your work. One should be aware that the should you produce something commercial in any way shape or form, you owe Troll something like ~$1500US- and I can't remember if the Free QT license ammended the rule such that the Windows version was free for GPLed works. If it hasn't been, you'll need to pony up (and anybody else that works on it) ~$1500US to do it.

    Other equally good options include GTK+, GTK+/GTK--, GTK+/WxWindows (WxWindows would use the native Windows calls under Windows...), and Fltk come immediately to mind as likely cross-platform GUI apis.
  • I alwase thought that the use of templates was a "kludge" to avoid the fact that there is no base object in C++. Its the OO thing to do.

  • > Uhm...Java doesn't NEED templates. Templates are a kludge

    Generic Programming has been around for over 20 years.

    You might want to pick up a copy of Generic Programming and the STL [amazon.com] and see just how usefull they can be.

    OOP is not a silver bullet (and neither is Templates or Generics.) Multiple programming paradigms are sometimes needed and I would rather use a language that gives me that freedom instead of restricting my algorithms.

    Cheers
  • I think what we're going to see in the future is the 'traditional unix-style software' developed with 'traditional unix-style tools' ... and glitzy programs with lots of front-end eye candy developed with tools such as KDevelop.

    Let's face it, we need the eye candy to attract the non-technical users and to get Linux running on demo machines in computer stores. The next great Linux desktop app will probably be written using something like KDevelop. The next great Linux server app will probably be written using vi or emacs.

    --
  • I read somewhere that the editor was soposed to be selecteble from a menu option in a latter version of KDevelop.

    This means using Emacs or some other manly editor will be less than trivial. In the mean time you shuld be able to hack something like "kfte" into it with little effort.

    xemacs may take a bit more sweat.

  • Hog Wash (Score:3)

    by Ih8sG8s ( 4112 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @05:57AM (#1241530)
    KDevelop can be used to develop anything from KDE apps to daemons. Personally, I have only used it for non-graphical applications, and I have found it to be quite good. The Class browser is excellent, and it certainly aided me in farmiliarizing myself with the code in an already in-progress game. (adonthell.linuxgames.com)

    I am developing the combat engine in KDevelop, and I have found it first class.

    I won't argue with your bulleted points, just the foul smelling bits at the end. I use vi extensively, and mostly run on a command line in Linux. To say that someone using a GUI to get a job done is 'not in the UNIX style' is hog wash.

    Do you really think that working with your graphics card in text mode makes you a *real man*, and a true UNIX developer?

    Come on, you're smarter than that.
  • What's up with that?

    K.
    -
  • This will be easy when the KDE 2 version of KDevelop is released because it will use the KParts object framework. You will be able to embed anything that can be used as a part.

    In fact if you want to embed emacs etc. you can already do it using the tools menu, but you lose lots of nice features such as the ability to navigate your code using the class viewer.

  • Eventually, this should be very easy. Because of the Kparts system, you should be able to create a kparts-enabled text editor of your own, and then once KDevelop starts using Kparts, just switch to that. It should be a simple matter of choosing mime types. Currently, I beleive that you can simply replace kwrite with your own text editor by overwriting the kwrite binary. I haven't looked into this, but I'd hack into the kwrite code to add the stuff you want, rather than doing it from scratch, so that you don't have to worry about any hooks that you might miss.
  • In reality, templates provide type safeety while base object does not. If you don't want type safety you don't need templates.

    There's no such thing as "the" OO thing to do. OO means different things to different people.

    Gosling wants templates in Java. Go figure.
    --

  • Re:oops (Score:2)

    by Uruk ( 4907 )
    Of course they can do what they want - and I think that the poster acknowledges that.

    It's just that linux is made to be linux. Linux is a UNIX clone, and as such, has a certain heritage. What I think the guy is trying to point out is that even though you might be able to dress up Linux as something very similar to windows so that it will be attractive to certain types of people, (i.e. the windows converts as they come over to linux) that's not the main point of linux.
    Linux was supposed to be an alternative to windows, not a cheap bastardized rip off version that looks exactly like windows. And I don't think that that's what KDE or KDeveloper is doing, just that Linux is made to be Linux, and these types of programs are fine to run on linux, but they don't embody the soul of what the operating system is supposed to be about.

    But if you get enough developers using it, you may have a real shift in what type of software shows up for linux. Since we all seem pretty happy with our operating system right now, whatever "paradigm" that is in use seems to be pretty popular and seems to be working out. Why mess with success in the name of catering to a population moving over to linux from windows? If they want a pretty GUI to develop programs in that looks just like windows, well then stay with windows.

  • I'll agree with the "Moderator on Crack" comment... but I didn't think it was a troll or flamebait... I thought it was funny :)

    (granted I've got a warped sense of humor)
  • they [programs developed with kdevelop] don't embody the soul of what the operating system is supposed to be about

    Guess what? It doesn't matter at all.

    The operating system is the operating system, and the apps are the apps. the apps are not the operating system, and none of these have a soul, so they embode nothing.

    KDevelop is not even specially oriented at Linux users, anyway.
  • Ctrl-T and Ctrl-B toggle the output and tree views so you can edit code in full screen. I like this feature.
  • I have used Kdevelop for some time and I love it. It is one of the few big projects I actually bothered hacking to compile on FreeBSD w/o a port. (this was a while ago :-)

    Anyone who thinks they can exceed by a great margin the learning curve/productivity level of someone who is a veteran with VC++/KDevelop is mistaken. It takes a *god* in order to do much more.

    I forced myself to become very proficient with Vi.. and im probably better/more productive WITH Vi.. But I still choose to use KDevelop because *I* do a lot of work with VC++ and VB. (Hold down CTRL+SHIFT arrows to select).. blah at work and to come home and not have to switch thinking modes when I feel like hacking some mud code.. sweet. Keep it coming I like it a lot.

    I cannot tell the difference in anything except the debugging process. VC++ is GOOD. GDB gives it a good run for its money if you force yourself to become *god* with it tho. In fact I find GDB a little easier to use so the debugger thing could be a no again.. this is just me tho point.

    Basically its just an awesome product and I really hate to see people slam it saying Vi or Emacs!!!! Open your mind a little and realize these are just tools to complete a job. Use what suits you best but dont Bias yourself towards a tool of equal quality just because you dont think its the *nix way.

    I happen to think that Emacs is really great and I would prefer I could use Emacs all day all over.. but I cant so I am making trade offs for my sanity *snaps*.

    Jeremy Allen
  • I agree. I wonder why there is so many who wants to make text editors? KDE has a couple, GNOME too. I think gIDE also has it's own internal editor. Is it too hard (or too boring :-) to integrate exixting editors (emacs, nvi, vim, and so on).

    I would gladly use KDevelop if it could use emacs instead. But since edit text is what one does the most, I use emacs. The class browser and wizards are nice, but I will not use an inferior editor to get those features.

    Nice work by the KDevelop team but please, please, don't forget the editor.
  • There ARE C++ classes for GTK. Come on if *I* knew about that its sad :p
  • Amen to that. Nedit absolutely rules as an editor, and it's pretty easy for people used to GUIs to learn. The only real hangup I can see is that the GUI layer in Nedit is Motif/Lesstif built. That could complicate embeedding it in Kdevelop. Nevertheless the editor guts with autoindent, bracket matching, etc are still there. Here's the Nedit homepage: www.nedit.org [nedit.org]
  • Totally offtopic...

    Yes, there are bindings for gtk+ in C++, gtk-- [sourceforge.net]. They are located on sourceforge [sourceforge.net]. They are currently finishing the last beta before releasing 1.2 which will likely ship as part of GNOME.

    They may not be quite the same quality as the professional Qt toolkit, but they are useful, free, and designed to fit well with STL and C++.

    --Karl Nelson, Lead Author of Gtk--

  • Just a note of the status. The port of gtk-- was just contributed recently but has not yet made it to the distribution. Unfortunately, it is only available in static form because of the incomplete port of gtk+. Gtk+ support of windows platform is just starting to be incorperated back into the source base. It will likely not be considered completely supported until the release of gtk+ 1.4 later this year.

    Of course, you should evaluate for yourself whether static linking would be a problem for your application.

    --Karl Nelson, Lead Developer of Gtk--

  • Thanks I didnt have time to dig up what they really were but I know if people just have to have C++ there were good GTK bindings! :-) Thanks for the URL's etc. :-)
  • What, you mean like Yggdrasil? I don't think it has KDE at all. I suspect you'll find that any distribution that ships with KDE at all ships with KDE 1.1.2. (Does anyone know of a currently available distribution that uses an older version?)

    --

  • Linux was supposed to be an alternative to windows, not a cheap bastardized rip off version that looks exactly like windows.

    I have to disagree with you here. Linux is supposed to be whatever you want it to be! The source is available and open precisely so you can hack on it and turn it into whatever you want. The whole system is open and exposed to your tinkering for exactly the same reason.

    This means that if you want something that looks exactly like Windows (but runs on a Unix core), then Linux is supposed to be an OS capable of giving you exactly that! It's the OS that you should be able to make into anything you like, and if that's what you like, then that's exactly what Linux should be able to deliver.

    If you want Linux to be Windows, and you can't do it, then not only is Linux failing to be Windows, but Linux is also failing to be Linux!

    Windows is an OS where someone else decides how you should do things and how they should look. Linux is not supposed to be like that. Anyone who therefore feels that Linux must be like Unix, or thinks Linux is "supposed to be about" emulating Unix rather than Windows or whatever other use poeple want to put it to, these people are people who still don't get it! Who are you to decide what programs are "being true" to the vision of Linux? People are diverse, we all have our own visions of what an OS should be. Linux should be able to embody all of them, except for the visions of those who think the point of Linux is to force others to work under their vision, such as some people who seem to think anyone using Linux should be forced to share the Unix vision.

    I love Unix. I fell in love with it the first time I used it in 1987. I used Solaris on a daily basis for most of the 90's. I love Linux because it implements a Unix-like vision of how computers should work. But I'm not fool enough to believe everyone in the world shares my vision, or even that they should. I'm hopeful enough to believe Linux is capable of encompassing the visions of all these other users, as well as my own. If it cannot, then Linux truly will be a failure...

    --

  • Have you ever USED VC++ or just seen screenshots and assumed it was exactly like KDevelop?

    I've used it close to 8 hours a day every workday for the last 3.7 years. My biggest complaint about its windowing system is that it uses MDI, so you can't have multiple arbitrarily-sized edit windows. Also, everything that can be undocked wants to be on top of the main pane, you can't just select the edit pane to put it on top, you have to resize or close the undocked window.

    It also has some weaknesses in that the "go to definition/reference" option doesn't work on stuff not in the selected subproject, even if it's part of the whole project, and likewise you can't select "compile" on a file that is not part of the active subproject. We broke our app so our model stuff is part of a .lib that gets linked into the main app, so I hit that all the time.

    Their non-standard C++ is rather a pain also (things like the scope of variables in a for loop, whether new throws or returns NULL, the inability to define pure virtual functions, and so on.)

    Their search engine has some neat extensions (such as the "Whole word only" checkbox), but significant limitations. There's no equivalent to grep's -L or -l, for example, and the checkbox settings have to be used for all pieces of an or'ed or and'ed search. I keep cygwin around largely to do complex search operations.

    Still, there's a lot to like that should be learned from when one is developing an IDE. Unlike some IDEs (Metrowerks, for example), it creates text makefiles.
  • >>But I degress, if you need some IDE your not a real programmer anyway

    Perhaps you could enlighten me, but I fail to understand how the way in which one essentially keeps track of his files, determines his worth as a programmer?

    www.umr.edu/~tcaton

  • Re:Debian source? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://kde.tdyc.com/
  • Well, yes, Linux is free software and people can do with it what they want, within the license.

    However, that doesn't mean that one should abandon all thought on what the consequences of particular developments are. What happens if Microsoft ports Office to Linux and releases it? What happens if Linux development becomes more and more Windows-like?

    Your answer seems to be that it doesn't matter: there will simply be more and more distributions catering to different tastes. That may turn out to be the case. I hope so, because I think that's the best of all worlds.

    But it isn't the only way things can unfold. he fact that many of the Windows UI windows don't resize, that they lock each other, that MFC has serious flaws in its inheritance hierarchy, that the Windows requires various kinds of even tables, etc., are all consequences of a particular approach to programming.

    Some of those issues are related to historical developments, some to programming style prevalent in the Windows community, and some are related to the use of an environment like VC++: it allows people to fix problems by building wizards and graphical tools that then generate complex source code that is difficult to maintain by hand.

    It's useful to think about this ahead of time because a lot of the design you see in the Linux kernel, GNU libraries, and Linux libraries comes out of a tradition and development environment that made certain things hard and therefore forced people to come up with different (I think better) designs. I believe that traditional UNIX environment forced you to design more cleanly, build general tools, and build good abstractions, because it simply didn't support good visualizations and expedient fixes.

    I believe it is worth thinking about these issues now while KDevelop and tools like it aren't that widely used yet. Maybe we can improve the way the two approaches to programming can live side-by-side. Maybe it doesn't matter because KDevelop might not catch on. Or maybe your optimism is warranted and different communities of people will just use different distributions, all somewhat interoperable.

  • Re:oops (Score:2)

    by Uruk ( 4907 )
    I didn't say it was a "bad" thing, I just meant that it's a different thing. What I was trying to say with the paragraph that you quoted was that what we have works, so why mess with success? I didn't say that anything that isn't the preordained way of doing things is necessarily bad. That's obviously not true.

    I also didn't claim that it's dumbing down linux. Those are your words you're putting into my mouth. They are again two completely different ways of doing things that I don't necessarily think mix well. That doesn't mean that I think one is "dumber" than the other.

    In my view projects like KDE are obviously redundant? Wrong again - I didn't say that either. I don't think KDE is redundant, I just think it's got a different user market than other projects. And I wouldn't necessarily say that Kdevelop the way it's being described is the same as the rest of the KDE project. I personally don't use KDE, but I don't begrudge people who do. KDE isn't redundant, it's just different. And before you go claiming that I slagged KDE, I said "different" not "bad" or "inferior" - they're very "different" things.

    About how using linux as a desktop OS could be a bad thing - it wouldn't be bad necessarily. I just think that if you're going to switch from windows to linux, then you may as well actually switch and learn something new, rather than just having people on the linux side of things rewrite all of your favorite apps for windows under linux. There's a time and a place for windowish applications under linux, and there's a time and a place for straight windows applications under linux (i.e. vmware, wine). I just don't think that they should slowly become the DEFAULT, which is how it seems to be going. (You need not insult me on that point, it's just an opinion)

    Oh, and by the way, I've used gdb in its pure command line form plenty of times, and I don't frankly find anything wrong with it. GDB is working on the assembly level of things, where there isn't much in the way of datastructures to visualize. After you invest the time in learning the way the app works, you can fly with just a command line gdb.

  • straw man, actually (Score:3)

    by jetson123 ( 13128 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @12:57PM (#1241567)
    You are shooting down a straw man: nowhere did I say that development from within Emacs was more "manly" or that you could only develop graphical applications in KDevelop. In fact, if KDevelop were only for graphical applications, it wouldn't much interest me who uses it.

    What I'm saying is that different people have different preferences and styles. KDevelop may well be enormously productive for you and the majority of programmers (just like VC++ is). But for me (and at least some other people), it's just not a good tool (believe me, I have tried). That doesn't mean either way is better than the other, it means that there are different groups of people with different skills and preferences. Just like command line users ought to admit that GUI-based development tools are useful to some, the reverse ought to be conceded too.

    What is an open question to me is whether the two kinds of styles can co-exist in the same community. Will I be able to make sense of, and contribute to, your libraries developed in KDevelop using my programming tools? Will you be able to handle modifications that I make to them outside KDevelop? I have dealt with MFC by hand, moved software packages back and forth between VC++ and the command line, etc., and I'm not that optimistic in the long run.

    Tools like VC++ and KDevelop tend to encourage much of the intelligence to move into the development environment, making the actual code difficult to read and maintain any other way. And, conversely, tools like VC++ and KDevelop tend not to be able to make a lot of sense of interesting abstractions implemented "by hand".

    Maybe my concerns are unfounded: KDevelop, KDE, and Qt are a lot cleaner than VC++ and MFC, and KDevelop tries to fit in well with the current Linux development styles (in fact, I'd much rather use KDevelop than VC++). But I'm not convinced that in the long run, this can work out.

    So, Linux may well split into a Windows-like community and a UNIX-like community, with less and less code sharing between them as time goes by. That's probably still better than a MS Windows/Linux split, but maybe by thinking about it ahead of time, we can at least make such a transition easier and have realistic expectations.

  • Qt is extremely portable between Windows and X (and rumours abound of a Mac version in progress). In fact, 99% of the code is identical between Windows and X. For closed-source work, you will need to buy the professional edition license from Troll, which shouldn't be too much of a problem if you can get your work to spring for it. Also, there is no free Windows version yet (Win users won't even register shareware, so why would they buy something for proprietary use if there's a free version around?).

    Some things you won't get is the *environment* stuff, since Qt is not meant to be an everything-in-one-packlage library like MFC. You will have to use the platform versions of thread libraries, configuration management, etc. But overall, an intelligent design will relegate all this stuff to just a single source file and a few #ifdef's.

    A good place for more info is the qt-interest mailing list, which you can sign up for at www.troll.no. The subscribers seem to be evenly split betwen X and Win users. It's definitely not a KDE dominated list.

  • Re:straw man, actually (Score:3)

    by Arandir ( 19206 ) on Monday February 28, 2000 @03:24PM (#1241573) Homepage Journal
    Tools like VC++ and KDevelop tend to encourage much of the intelligence to move into the development environment, making the actual code difficult to read and maintain any other way. And, conversely, tools like VC++ and KDevelop tend not to be able to make a lot of sense of interesting abstractions implemented "by hand".

    Take a closer look at KDevelop. Don't let it's superficial appearance fool you into thinking it's a VC++ clone. It is not. (tree on left, view on right and messages below actually makes sense).

    Beneath it all, KDevelop uses exactly the same tools you are: g++, make, autoconf, etc. No, its makefiles are not the most readable in the world, but that's an artifact of the autoconf schema, not of KDevelop. And unlike VC++, it won't try to write your classes for you. Other than the brief application "template", which you can easily replace, it does no coding for you. If you have it create a new class for you, it creates an empty one. KDevelop is essentially an editor, class browser, documentation browser, dialog editor and debugger, all rolled up into one with a ton of documentation thrown in to boot. It's not trying to change how you program, like VC++ does, but instead is trying to give you all the tools you need in one package.

    No, the editor doesn't have the power of emacs. So what? For some people, this is actually a plus. And the debugger isn't as rich as ddd, and the dialog editor isn't as full blown as QtArchitect, etc. That's not the point. The point is that KDevelop has a whole bunch of good tools integrated into one IDE.
  • But I degress, if you need some IDE your not a real programmer anyway

    Real programmers don't give one shit if you approve of their tools or not. You are meaningless to them.
  • I use ddd for debugging. It is a nice interface to gdb and it can display variables and classes neatly. So i use vim and ddd (and a lot of bash scripts). Its pretty nice.
  • have fun coding that one.. I can see lots of interface issues that come to mind pretty quickly :P
  • I use XEMACS for most all my editing, and it is generally pretty useful. For debugging, though, I sometimes have to use gdb because XEMACS is a pain in the ass.

    First, as soon as I start debugging, my source code goes read only. So I don't have any convenient way to make changes in my source until I kill the debugger. This is probably so that gdb keeps sync with my source code frame, but it is still annoying.

    Second, XEMACS pulls focus away from my command line window every time I step through any instruction. Yes, I want to see the pointers move as it runs, but NO! I don't want to have to pull focus back to my gdb command line to print a variable, dump memory, or whatever.

    And maybe this is a trivial gripe, but XEMACS cannot figure out that I might want to debug the program in the current buffers. Instead, I have to navigate the file requester boxes to point out the executable. Now I am just a programmer to say this, but maybe it could figure out that if I have someprog.c in my window, and I want to debug, just MAYBE the executable is called someprog? Oh, well... Maybe I am just an ungrateful bastard...

    In short, while (X)EMACS has some handy debugging support, I will generally opt for running gdb from the command line 70-90% of the time.
  • The notion that casting down from Object is a replacement for tempaltes is pure and utter garbage. Please go on comp.object and post this opinion - it would be amusing to see them fry you like bacon.

    Here's your first hint - casting from Object removes all your static type checking. Your basically taking a stab in the dark at that point.

  • C++ is a multi-prardigm language. You can program in OO. You can program procedurally. Its up to you. This is considered a strength of the language - if OO falls out of fashion, Java is hosed. C++ can easily be adapted to other paradigms, such as generic programming.

    Since C++ is mutli-paradigm, having a set of built-in classes wouldn't make sense.

    Also, having built in classes can be either a benefit or a curse. When they are well designed (smalltalk), they make programming a joy. When they are a moving target (Java), you're sometimes better off avoiding them altogether.

  • When I try it, the KAppWizard of KDevelop generates more than 500 lines of source code for an empty GUI program, complete with VC++-style "fill in the blanks" comments. It also has a "dialog editor" just like VC++ that lets programmers design GUIs "visually".

    Perhaps emblematic of what I'm getting at is that KDevelop makes it possible to write a KDE GUI program without any clear understanding of how the toolkit works--as I demonstrated myself. To me, it still looks like KDevelop supports and encourages a style to programming similar to what prevails on Windows. Both opinions and preferences differ on this point, but to me, that is not a plus.

  • Well, you get the source to MFC, so if Microsoft stop supporting it, you can continue to extend it. That said, it's very unlikely that MFC will be dumped any time soon. Almost everything written in windows is based on MFC.
  • Whatever you do don't use MFC. Performance sucks and it is a bitch to maintian MFC code. Someone ought to drag the MFC developers over to BeOS's website and make them learn a GOOD C++ API.
  • Thats untrue. Very few REAL developers use MFC because it is A) A bitch to code. B) A bitch to maintain and C) A bitch with runtime performance. All MFC developers should be forced to run their own applications.
  • That is the exact kind of snobish attitude that pisses me off. Windows devlopers are GOOD. A lot of them could kick the ass of half of the Linux kernel hackers, including Linus himself. They choose to program for windows because thats what everyone uses. Face it Linux is not mainstream yet. Everyone has heard of it, but 5 people outside the nerd community use it on their desktops. Just because they program for the OS that makes the most business sense doesn't mean their bad programmers. I'm sure the guys at Adobe could whoop the guys at GIMP in a coding contest. Same thing for the guys at a dozen other companies that put out good products despite their OS limitations. Hell even the guys at Microsoft (esp. the guys who programmed DirectDraw and DirectSound and DirectInput) could teach the Linux developers a few lessons. Don't be a Linux bigot. Its just as bad as a window bigot.
  • The application template that the appwizard creates is just that, a template. What's the big deal? Most developers have their own templates anyway, whether or not they're using an IDE. If you don't like the templates that KDevelop gives you, replace them with your own (under /opt/kde/share/apps/kdevelop/templates) or just don't use them.

    And what's your beef with dialog editors? Do you think that this came straight from the VC++ world? Hardly! Unlike VC++, the output of KDevelop dialogs is real code, not a bunch of numbers. Again, it's up to you whether or not you want to use a dialog editor, or if you prefer to use the straightforward and easy layout widgets of Qt directly.

    But your quote that "KDevelop makes it possible to write a KDE GUI program without any clear understanding of how the toolkit works" makes me think that you haven't really used KDevelop on a real project. The dialog editor may layout the visual aspects of a dialog, but all it really does is generate widget declarations, leaving the actual code to the developer.

    To use KDevelop, you have to know how to program! How can I make it any clearer than that? I have a coworker who spent a few years writing VB programs. He thought he was a programmer because he could create programs. To compare a KDevelop programmer to this type of person, who doesn't even know what a pointer is, is insulting.
  • Do you mean Red Hat is forgetting about script updates, and generally paying no attention to detail?

    Who would have thought... that's why I like Slackware.

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