Syntax highlighting, reference and dependency finding and refactoring. How I did it.

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cross mob
kemic_264446
Level 4
Level 4
First like received

 I really like Creator. I am a big fan of it and use it daily. It is a very good quality product in my humble opinion.

   

However the developer teams have concentrated on core functionality, so some features that we are used to in other products like Netbeans, Eclipse or Visual Studio are not presently available. I'm sure they'll come in time. 

   

Some of the features I would like to have available are things like:

   
        
  • Code Browser (methods and members)
  •     
  • Refactoring
  •     
  • 'Find All references' for members and methods.
  •     
  • 'Jump to Declaration' for members, methods and #DEFINEs
  •     
  • etc
  •    
   

 

   

Add in to the mix, the fact that my main workspace just now contains a bootloadable project and a bootloader. In this case, this intrduces a bug where Creator contantly re-reads the bootloader.hex file from disc, continously, over and over again. This cuases a bit of cludgyness when editing, with the cursor occasionally being slow or jumpy, and an overall sluggishness. This is on an 8-core Intel machine too.

   

So anyway, I happen also to have Visual Studio 2010 installed, so here's what I did to make a nice smooth editing environment.

   

I created a new 'empty' project in VS2010 and imported all the .c and .h files from my Creator workspace. I did NOT select the option to 'copy' them to the VS Project directory - thus they are edited 'in place' rather than being copied. I open the project in Creator and the VS2010 project at the same time, and close all the files in Creator.

   

Visual Studio does a good job of analyzing all the files and finding all the references, and does a great job of syntax highlighting, code folding etc. All the features like refactoring, finding references, jumping to definitions etc etc all work really well. 

   

When I'm done editing and need to build the project I just ALT-TAB back to Creator and hit the build button. Creator automatically picks up all the changes without complaint and builds perfectly. Of course if there are any errors in the code, creator tells you which file and line and you can quickly locate the same line in the VS2010 project. Of course you cannot build or debug from withing VS2010 - but it makes a great editor and it's only an ALT-TAB away from all the debugging and build options you need inside creator.

   

Hope this helps.

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4 Replies
Anonymous
Not applicable

 I use ultraedit, best editor ever used. highly recommended.

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crcac_264396
Level 4
Level 4
First like received

 Yes, thanks.

   

There are a few editors that will even let you use autocomplete (intellisense style). I for one don't program often enough or have a good enough memory to recall all the API functions.

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kemic_264446
Level 4
Level 4
First like received

 Yeah - VS2010 is an expensive solution, but I had it anyway.

   

Autocomplete works in VS2010 for most things in the project 🙂

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Anonymous
Not applicable

 I use Eclipse in the same manner as how you are using VS.  To be honest, I'm a bit surprised that Cypress hasn't jumped on board with using Eclipse for their code editor.  If you look at similar tools from Altera and Xilinx, you'll quickly see that they are both are using Eclipse-based editors.  While I admit that it took me a while to get used to Eclipse, after I picked up on the shortcuts and keys, I really can't live without it.

   

Just my $0.02.

   

--tim

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