Interesting ideas for future IDE for Oxygen

[kryton9]

Charles, I was reading about developing for Android via command line tools instead of using eclipse, just out of curiosity. Anyways, one of the pages mentioned what I am pasting next. I thought interesting that there is such a tool. Maybe you could incorporate it into future IDE.

Ctags for Autocompletion

Install exhuberant-ctags and run ctags -R src gen in the root of your project to generate a tags file that many editors will automatically use for autocompletion.
Further automation

I'm planning on eventually writing a script that uses inotify (inotifywait -m -r) to watch for source code changes and automatically rebuild and re-scan the code with ctags. (Although I'm not sure if editors will detect changes to the tags file on the fly... must research that.)

Here is more info:
http://ctags.sourceforge.net/ctags.html

[Charles Pegge]

Thanks Kent.

Yes that sounds very useful. I have plans to be able to track any word in a source file and see what it does, and use it for hyperlinking to any other project file. I wrote an editor with this facility in the '90s (working in DOS ) and it was very effective.

Charles

[kryton9]

There is still a lot that could be done to improve IDE's.  I always think about Star Trek Next Generation and programming on there. To be able to code fixes on the fly in emergency situations of such a complex system and how one could work quickly, then it helps give good ideas. We have a long way to go.