SciTE and ctags

I've been using SciTE as editor of choice for some time, and spent a little time today getting a few extra things working for C99 projects. This year I'm refreshing my C a bit, as I haven't done anything which has specifically used C99.

There's support in SciTE for autocompletion of words within the file by hitting Ctrl+Enter, but you can also add .api files which list function prototypes for an API, giving autocompletion via Ctrl+I. You can either use the files provided for C and Java, or use ctags and a bit of Python to build your own.

The C.api file on scintilla.org is a bit small, but I couldn't get ctags to find most of the prototypes from /usr/include/*.h and /usr/include/sys/*.h. So I made a little bash script to pass each header through cpp, then extract it, which worked OK.

This seems to work to generate tags file for conversion to SciTE api file:

    ctags -f - --c-kinds=+p-d --excmd=number  /usr/include/*.h | grep -E "^[^~_]" > tags 

or from the kin project folder:

    ctags -f - --c-kinds=+p-d --excmd=number  src/core/*.h | grep -E "^([^_~]|_[^_])" > tags 

without --excmd=number the python script fails to convert the tags to api, as it uses patterns rather than line numbers.


Also changed some of user properties - to break it up a bit more with files into the ~/.SciTE/ folder. This moves the c and asm highlighing into separate files, a machine.properties file for machine specifics (such as where to put the window and whether to show tabs and status, which depends on screen size).

I also created a 'workbook.sh' script to write the date to today's workbook file and open it.

To get directory properties working, enable them in user properties with

    properties.directory.enable=1

Then the SciTEDirectory.properties file has its local settings for the project. This defines

    # project home
    ProjectHome=$(SciteDirectoryHome)

    # make 
    make.command=cd $(ProjectHome); make $(FileName)

    # go
    command.go.*.c=cd $(ProjectHome);bin/$(FileName)

    # Extend C API with project API
    api.*.c=/home/pete/.SciTE/c99.api;project.api

    # Retag
    command.name.1.*=Retag
    command.subsystem.1.*=2
    command.1.*=cd $(ProjectHome);\
        ctags -f - --c-kinds=+p --excmd=number  src/core/*.h | grep -E "^(kini?|opcode)_" > project.tags; \
        python ~/.SciTE/tags2api.py project.tags > project.api\
        rm project.tags

    # Apropos
    command.name.2.*=Apropos
    command.subsystem.2.*=1
    command.2.*=grep -E $(CurrentWord) /home/pete/.SciTE/c99.api $(ProjectHome)/project.api

    # Info
    command.name.3.*=Info
    command.subsystem.3.*=1
    command.3.*=firefox http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/functions/$(CurrentWord).html 

This means build and run are performed in the project folder, and adds three extra commands - the first runs ctags to rebuild the project's tag index. The second searches the tag index for a highlighted word as a substring (rather than the built-in popup, which you type the first few letters). The third opens the unix spec for the highlighted function, which includes the C standard library functions too.

I've put the contents of my ~/.SciTE folder here, along with my .SciTEUser.properties file. There's the generated C99.api, asm and cpp properties without bold fonts (which mess up formatting), a version of cleanup.cc which will compile with gcc, protags.sh which preprocesses and ctags include files, and workbook.sh which creates a workbook/TODAY.log file and opens it in SciTE.

Dynamic languages tools

Link: http://blogs.activestate.com/ericp/2007/01/kid_adding_a_ne.html

I got a CD with Komodo Edit on it at XTech, but haven't tried it until now. The recent open-sourcing of the code, and then this post appeared on Planet Mozilla.

It looks like it would be good for DSL development, and playing with it Komodo Edit seems to be very usable. My current editor of choice is SciTE, which Komodo Edit embeds, but Komodo Edit gives projects, and language aware autocompletion and navigation (go to the definition of a function). I haven't found out if it's possible to go to definitions in other files, which would be very useful - I spend quite a lot of time doing Ctrl-C,Ctrl-O,[filename],Ctrl-F,Ctrl-V,Enter to jump around a JavaScript project. It also does polyglot programming - a simple XUL file with a script element switches nicely from XML highlighting to JavaScript highlighting in the script element's content.

The user defined language tool is lexer + state machine based; I'd have preferred it to be a packrat based one, which I've played with before. But I don't want to have to write a whole IDE, I like using the Scintilla editor control, and Komodo's approach seems to get the job done.

As a side note, del.icio.us seems awfully slow these days. You'd have though that Yahoo would be able to give it a couple more servers. I wonder if the competitors are any better.