Hi,

As far as I understand, the SideKick plugin (and the language-specific plugins that use it) simply provides an "outline" dockable for the current buffer. Am I wrong? How is that related to projects and to building? (Of course, one can put everything in a plugin, but the plugin name should reflect its functionality...)

Also, as far as the outline is concerned, what is the added value in having a C parser compared to the CodeBrowser plugin that uses ctags? From what I saw, ctags does a very good job in locating definitions. Currently, some things are missing in CodeBrowser because it uses the default set of tag types, but ctags can provide much more.

A few weeks ago I actually thought of writing a fast C/C++ parser myself, that will be able to quickly scan large projects and provide all the browsing needs. But a good C++ parser takes a long time to write, and since I found the GNU 'global' tool, I think I can simply use it together with ctags. These tools are quite fast and suitable for large projects. One drawback of such plugins is that the users need to download & install other tools in order to use them. But since these are all FOSS tools, maybe they can be packaged together with the plugins for easy installation.

Shlomy

For Project Management, there is the Project Viewer. A plugin can write a C++ Project Options Pane that plugs into the ProjectViewer's Project Options.

For building files and parsing the error messages, there is the Console, and the ErrorList respectively. Console can run "Make" out of the current directory of the project you have opened, for example.

For Code Browsing, there is (as already mentioned) codebrowser. Also the Tags, CscopeFinder, and Jump plugins for jumping around in the code. And now there is CtagsSideKick (yay!!).

I'm sure there could be more features added, but it is important that we don't duplicate existing functionalities

Another thought I had was to merge the "Tags" plugin with the CtagsSideKick, since they both are handy together, and both depend on ctags...

Well, turns out my emails to jedit-devel were "redirected to /dev/null" . So here's one section from these emails, that I sent a week ago, where I wanted to consult with users and developers:

There are currently a number of plugins that make use of ctags: CodeBrowser, Tags (which parses ctags output), and Jump! (pardon me if I forgot something). Each plugin has its own implementation of the ctags interface (running ctags, parsing ctags output, tag database). I think it's time to create a new library (plugin?) that simply provide ctags interface for all plugins that want to use ctags. One of the functions of that library/plugin would be to allow customization of the ctags command-line for each mode or file-extension, which is currently missing in both CodeBrowser and Jump!. What do you think? It could also provide the added-value of sharing the tag database between multiple plugins, so CodeBrowser won't need to run ctags if Jump! had already done it for the current buffer, and new plugins can be written to provide additional browsing information, such as a class hierarchy, using the already-parsed data.

Shlomy

Sorry, I am not familiar with jEdit website