Trent's Development Tools & Personal Libraries

Note: all the stuff on this page is open source or free software (eg subject to the GNU [lesser] GPL). However, most are subject to copyright.

Quick access: Mini Makefile Generic Makefile (view).

Editing / Essential Software Libraries

FTE - The Folding Text Editor

FTE is the best editor ever, IMHO. It's responsive, never crashes, has full indentation support, syntax highlighting, fast buffer switching, easy incorporation with make, and oodles of other features. It's a cinch to use over X-Win and remains usable over dialup. Folding is also handy, but I tend not to use it much - I can see the benefit in something like java files though. It's open source; maintained at Sourceforge and has a home page and a project page with the latest cvs and releases. I've hacked the code myself to do a few things like smarter block commenting, and the configuration files are a little confusing so I've set it up "the way I like it" on staff and on ugrad, and you should be able to run it by just going

~tapted/bin/ft

at a command prompt, which will run a script to set you up. There's also console versions (no X Server required -- just PuTTY or similar), but I haven't set them up (cos I don't use them). If you want to continue my hackage, there's my modified fte source and linux binaries with all the console stuff (sfte, nfte, vfte). You might also want to look at the script I'm using to run it on staff and on ugrad.

GNU Common C++2

Get it. Get it now. Don't waste a single second more. Don't you dare write any socket code in C++, nor any threading until you've looked at this library. You'd need to have a very good reason not to use it. An essential extension to the STL, aims to be platform independent (but has a little way to go -- works best on full posix-compliant systems). It's well documented and mostly bug free. The exception model has been a bit buggy for me at times though. It has oodles more features. There's also extensions to it and a very decent doxygen-generated documentation for it. On staff, I've got it set up for you in

~tapted/include/

~tapted/lib/

so if you want to use it, use the flag

-I/usr/staff/tapted/include

for compilation (#include <cc++/thread.h> //for example). And use the flags

-L/usr/staff/tapted/lib -lccgnu2

for linking. Depending what parts you used, you may also need

-lpthread

and

-ldl

Sorry, I haven't been borked setting it up on ugrad as well.

wxWindows

wxWindows is a cross-platform GUI library for C++. It's good. It's even about to be developed for embedded platforms (ARM/PocketPC/WindowsCE/etc). Unfortunately, there's not yet a good free IDE for it, but there's one in development and a decent-looking commercial Dialog Editor

Source manipulation

Doxygen

No program since has got me as excited as doxygen did when I first delved into its plethora of features. It keeps getting better too - the most recent addition being UML-style inheritance and collaboration diagrams, and call graphs. It's a documentation generator similar to javadoc but orders of magnitudes better. I used it to generate all the documentation for my own source included as part of these devTools. There is also mkDoxy, which is a Perl script to make doxygen docs for Makefiles.

GNU Enscript

GNU Enscript is a typesetter for program code. It's by far the best I've come across, but credit goes to Dave Symonds for pointing me to it. IMHO, it's the only way to print code out; if it's about to be marked, for example. I've written oodles of shell scripts to make it easier to use and get (what I think is) the best out of all the oodles of stuff it can do. I'll put them up soon. For now, just try

~tapted/bin/code2ps <files>

~tapted/bin/code2ps2 <files>

for 2-up landscape. It should work on staff or ugrad. It will make a file firstfile.ext-all.ps containing everything with a table of contents and it will use ext to determine the language.

Java Tools

As well as FTE, doxygen and enscript, the following will probably come in handy.

jikes

Jikes is IBM's Java compiler. javac sucks because it's actually written in Java (don't ask me how they compiled it orignally) therefore it is heinously slow. Jikes is written in C/C++ and gives much better error messages (use -E if you want single lines for FTE -- you can specify this in mmake). The only caveat is that it needs to know where your jdk (for the java library), so make sure you have a line something like

export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:/usr/local/j2sdk1.4.1_01/jre/lib/rt.jar

at the end of your .bashrc or .bash_profile. Jikes is installed on ugrad.

mmake

mmake is just a shell script to make Makefiles for Java. It's pretty handy, smoothing the transition from java source (packages) to libraries (classpath) to jar files and documentation. It also good because it encourages good organisation of files used in the development process. By default it uses jikes. It will make a make file that will turn out a lot faster than javac *.java for ordinary development too. mmake is just a shell script and so is tiny - get it.

My Libraries - Linux Programming

Playing WAV Files

Playing WAV files (or any sound file) in linux from C++ source is a bitch. GNU Common C++2 has a neat sound extension package for manipulating audio CDs, but the WAV file support is just for manipulating the bytes, not actually sending it to a sound card. SDL can do bits of it, but the API is a rather heinous and it doesn't yet support recording.

I used to go on about an SDL wrapper I wrote at this point. But that also turned out to be quite insufficient. So more recently, I wrote a reasonably sophistiated mixer using portaudio and libsndfile. Some documentation is in a subdirectory, or start at the AudioSystem class reference.

My Libraries - Platform Independent

Random numbers

There's oodles of random number generators, nearly all are periodic. The best one I've come accross is ISAAC (Indirection, Shift, Accumulate, Add, and Count), developed by Bob Jenkins. I've added some extra goodies (nrand, drand) to the C++ version by Quinn Tyler Jackson (homepage is broken). This is my source; it also has some documentation.