Beginners' guide for setting up Emacs with gcc/gdb?

Question

I looked around the GNU emacs material and didn't find anything helpful.

Does anyone know of a good tutorial for setting up emacs, to basically turn it into an IDE? I'm looking for interfacing with gcc/gdb/make, etc...

Answer 1

Like other answers mentioned, M-x compile, M-x gdb will get you going. While debugging, I'd also suggest gdb-many-windows-mode, which makes Emacs look a bit closer to IDE when debugging.

Besides that and to get closer to "IDE-like features", you can look at:

• CEDET http://cedet.sourceforge.net/ for code completion and project support. Excellent tutorial at http://xtalk.msk.su/~ott/en/writings/emacs-devenv/EmacsCedet.html .
• If you don't mind using non-free software, Xrefactory (http://www.xref.sk/xrefactory/main.html) is probably the best (well, the only) refactoring tool. The C version is free, the C++ is not.

Answer 2

Yuval, you're probably being misled by looking for something about IDEs. All that stuff is automagically built into EMACS except for the CScope-like searching stuff.

• M-x compile runs make by default, although I reset it to run Ant in java mode.
• M-x gdb runs gdb
• C-x ` (Ctrl-X backquote) goes to the next compile error

and so on.

Go dig about in the EMACS Wiki. Lots of good stuff. The Programming Category is where you should look.

Answer 3

Good Article

Look at CScope too... you just have to add two lines to your .emacs to be able to navigate through definitions and references

Answer 4

Even though not directly related to C/C++ i find that using a good color scheme is important. Try:

M-x color-theme-select

and you can browse around a lot of different setups if you do not want to create your own.

Answer 5

If you're working with version control system, you can find useful information in another my article about work with version control systems from emacs