28.5 Emacs Development Environment

EDE (Emacs Development Environment) is a package that simplifies the task of creating, building, and debugging large programs with Emacs. It provides some of the features of an IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, in Emacs.

This section provides a brief description of EDE usage. For full details, see EDE in Emacs Development Environment.

EDE is implemented as a global minor mode (see Minor Modes). To enable it, type M-x global-ede-mode or click on the ‘Project Support (EDE)’ item in the ‘Tools’ menu. You can also enable EDE each time you start Emacs, by adding the following line to your initialization file:

(global-ede-mode t)

Activating EDE adds a menu named ‘Development’ to the menu bar. Many EDE commands, including the ones described below, can be invoked from this menu.

EDE organizes files into projects, which correspond to directory trees. The project root is the topmost directory of a project. To define a new project, visit a file in the desired project root and type M-x ede-new. This command prompts for a project type, which refers to the underlying method that EDE will use to manage the project (see EDE in Emacs Development Environment). The most common project types are ‘Make’, which uses Makefiles, and ‘Automake’, which uses GNU Automake (see Automake in Automake). In both cases, EDE also creates a file named Project.ede, which stores information about the project.

A project may contain one or more targets. A target can be an object file, executable program, or some other type of file, which is built from one or more of the files in the project.

To add a new target to a project, type C-c . t (M-x ede-new-target). This command also asks if you wish to add the current file to that target, which means that the target is to be built from that file. After you have defined a target, you can add more files to it by typing C-c . a (ede-add-file).

To build a target, type C-c . c (ede-compile-target). To build all the targets in the project, type C-c . C (ede-compile-project). EDE uses the file types to guess how the target should be built.