Skip to main content

My IDE needs a makeover

Current Setup

I am a Linux Distribution Engineer and work on arbitrary open source projects. Mostly I'm patching/packaging existing things, and sometimes start fresh projects.

My "IDE", or rather I shall say "toolbox" is rather sparse:

  • GNOME Terminal
  • Google Chrome
  • GNU Emacs
  • GCC toolcahin with GDB
  • Python3 - iPython, iPdb, pyflakes
  • git, GNU bazaar
There are a few things that annoy me, and should be done better these days.

Documentation

I lookup documentation mostly with Google Chrome. This includes the texinfo renderings of the docs. There are a few reasons for that. First of all my developer machine is not polluted with all the dev packages under the sun, instead I compile practically everything in a chroot. And most of the time chroots have much newer versions of everything (from gcc & automake, to boost and whatever other dependencies are in use). However I would like to have easy generic lookup builtin for common things that I lookup in the references and which have not changed for a long time:
  • gcc builtins & defines
  • glibc functions
  • automake/autoconf functions definitions
Given that my preferred editor is Emacs, it should be natural to use `info' mode to look things up. However, the rendering there is archaic and is really hard to read. At least when visiting the HTML renderings, the function names are in bold and stand out from the rest of the description.

Ideally I would have unified place to lookup docs, instead of using Google Chrome and navigating: gnu.org, gnome.org, readthedocs.org, freedesktop.org.

Project Management

I really hate "traditional" IDEs that create and pollute the working directories with random extra files. My project management tool is VCS, thus .git should be automatically recognized as a "project". I should be able to navigate repository files, have them scanned for tab-completion and jumping to symbols and the like. At the moment, I exit the editor and use git grep to find things and open those files in the editor again. I don't use any tagging systems at the moment, ideally git repository would be scanned and Exuberant Tags (this seems to be the latest hotness in tagging space) stored inside the .git directory automatically.

"SDK" aware aka chroot support

The IDE should be aware of chroots, how to compile things in a chroot and ideally how to compile packages with sbuild, mock or obs build (these are apt, yum and zypper preferred solutions for package compilation). Most importantly to use those chroots to tag includes headers for tab completion.

Shell

Gnome Terminal is good enough for my needs. I do have a problem of too many terminal windows... I have tried Terminator (a tiling single-window / multiple-tabs terminal). However during development the things I use shell for, should be part of the IDE directly: changing projects, opening/closing/navigating/creating files, invoking build, invoking debug, "refactoring" (sed). I think I do want to try out a pull-down terminal for temporal look-ups together with a tiling "main" terminal. Or ideally ditch it all together. Emacs does provide multiple terminals, but when I did that I ended up with "inception" -> launching an instance of emacs, inside the terminal, inside emacs...

Conclusion

If anybody has tips or suggestions do share. I will investigate and experiment with all of the above, and see if I can experiment and find new cool things that work better than my current setup.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to disable TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 on Ubuntu

Example of website that only supports TLS v1.0, which is rejected by the client Overivew TLS v1.3 is the latest standard for secure communication over the internet. It is widely supported by desktops, servers and mobile phones. Recently Ubuntu 18.04 LTS received OpenSSL 1.1.1 update bringing the ability to potentially establish TLS v1.3 connections on the latest Ubuntu LTS release. Qualys SSL Labs Pulse report shows more than 15% adoption of TLS v1.3. It really is time to migrate from TLS v1.0 and TLS v1.1. As announced on the 15th of October 2018 Apple , Google , and Microsoft will disable TLS v1.0 and TLS v1.1 support by default and thus require TLS v1.2 to be supported by all clients and servers. Similarly, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will also require TLS v1.2 as the minimum TLS version as well. To prepare for the move to TLS v1.2, it is a good idea to disable TLS v1.0 and TLS v1.1 on your local systems and start observing and reporting any websites, systems and applications that...
6 comments
Read more

Ubuntu Livepatch service now supports over 60 different kernels

Linux kernel getting a livepatch whilst running a marathon. Generated with AI. Livepatch service eliminates the need for unplanned maintenance windows for high and critical severity kernel vulnerabilities by patching the Linux kernel while the system runs. Originally the service launched in 2016 with just a single kernel flavour supported. Over the years, additional kernels were added: new LTS releases, ESM kernels, Public Cloud kernels, and most recently HWE kernels too. Recently livepatch support was expanded for FIPS compliant kernels, Public cloud FIPS compliant kernels, and as well IBM Z (mainframe) kernels. Bringing the total of kernel flavours support to over 60 distinct kernel flavours supported in parallel. The table of supported kernels in the documentation lists the supported kernel flavours ABIs, the duration of individual build's support window, supported architectures, and the Ubuntu release. This work was only possible thanks to the collaboration with the Ubuntu C...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ubuntu 23.10 significantly reduces the installed kernel footprint

Photo by Pixabay Ubuntu systems typically have up to 3 kernels installed, before they are auto-removed by apt on classic installs. Historically the installation was optimized for metered download size only. However, kernel size growth and usage no longer warrant such optimizations. During the 23.10 Mantic Minatour cycle, I led a coordinated effort across multiple teams to implement lots of optimizations that together achieved unprecedented install footprint improvements. Given a typical install of 3 generic kernel ABIs in the default configuration on a regular-sized VM (2 CPU cores 8GB of RAM) the following metrics are achieved in Ubuntu 23.10 versus Ubuntu 22.04 LTS: 2x less disk space used (1,417MB vs 2,940MB, including initrd) 3x less peak RAM usage for the initrd boot (68MB vs 204MB) 0.5x increase in download size (949MB vs 600MB) 2.5x faster initrd generation (4.5s vs 11.3s) approximately the same total time (103s vs 98s, hardware dependent) For minimal cloud images that do not in...
Read more