Introduction

This open-source project is about making a fully-fledged and modern IDE built on top of popular Vim editor. Already existing numerous features found in Vim editor along with its powerful plugin engine will be used to carry out the features which can be found in more popular and mainstream IDEs. In contrast, this IDE will additionally put focus on some specific requirements not being addressed by any other IDE.

One to rule them all

Has it ever occurred to you to participate in a project(s) encompassing multiple platforms and/or technologies where each of them would impose a requirement for specific development toolsets, such as different IDEs, toolchains, debuggers, build systems etc.? If it has, then you will know how valuable would be to have a single and open-source product which could be utilized for whole such development. Why? There are numerous reasons behind it but development targeting various platforms is usually done in very specialized, and very often commercial, IDEs which:

mostly put focus on development for a particular platform
do not support development for any other platform or provide a very limited support
contain only a subset of features usually found in more advanced and mainstream IDEs
are not easily extensible by the community
are proprietary
etc.

Having a standard and unified product would mitigate the aforementioned problems, but will also make you not to unnecessary waste your precious time by constantly re-learning the same tools. This is a pretty much common scenario if you are performing in dynamic work environment (i.e. short-term projects). So, one of the main goals of this project will be to build a single toolset which will provide an integrated environment to develop code no matter what platform is targeted for, such as:

bare-metal,
RTOS,
embedded-Linux,
Android,
desktop Linux, OS X, Windows, ...

Large-scale software

Moreover, there is yet to be seen an IDE which can cope with a code base as large and as complex as Android. This is what you definitely want to have if you do Android platform development. No IDE which has been set to that challenge was able to handle it. Be it Eclipse, Qt Creator or Codelite, each one of them would crash on a 64-bit Intel-i5 @2.5GHz machine with 12GB of RAM. Crash would always occur during the very basic operation: creating a new project and importing an existing Android source code. In either case, RAM would be eventually eaten up, probably by background source code indexing services, resulting in an application and/or system freeze. This IDE will not get you into such problems.

Mixed programming languages software

And what about projects such as Android containing source code written in multiple programming languages? IDEs present on the market, or at least those that I am aware of, are usually able to handle single programming language per project. This in turn has a consequence of making the source code indexing service ignore all of the source code written in other programming languages and thus making impossible to utilize a whole lot of IDE features on such code (i.e. find symbol references, go to definition, auto-complete and alike). To give you an example, one could easily imagine a project which features a middleware written in Java and all other platform-specific or performance-wise stuff written in some of the native programming languages such as C or C++. If one is employed in developing code for the whole stack, it would be very limiting to have IDE features working only for the subset of programming languages used in the project. This is a very important issue which has been genuinely addressed by this IDE.

Good software design principles

Besides the aforementioned points, this IDE will also provide a complete development environment which will incorporate a programmers toolkit which provides more seamless way to design better software. For example, it will integrate tools for:

source code static analysis,
unit-testing,
source code management systems,
docs generation

Open-source at its finest

One may ask themselves is it really possible and realistic task to build a full-blown IDE in a reasonable time by a single developer? Thanks to the huge amount of open-source software which can be re-used and perfectly fitted into the IDE features, I think there is no space for doubt. Let me list just some of the open-source software this IDE relies on: Vim, GNU GCC, Clang, GDB, LLDB, GNU Make, ctags, cscope, gtags, cppcheck, clang-analyzer, Git, etc. Having in mind that open-source became a main driver in nowadays technology advances, this list will only get bigger and better.

Features

Bundled and tweaked for C/C++ development
- With plans to add support for Python & Java
Project management & Project explorer
- Featuring seamless project handling
Class browser
- Featuring an overview of symbols defined in current unit (i.e. macro, struct, class, method, namespace, etc.)
Source code auto-completion
- Featuring real C/C++ compiler back-end to ensure total correctness
Source code navigation
- Featuring a fully automated tag generation system running in background to ensure the best UI experience
Source code static analysis
- Featuring variety of tools to strengthen your code even more
Source code management client integration
- Featuring integration of Git client (and more to follow)
Build tools
- Featuring integration of make (and more to follow)
Many more miscellaneous features like:
- Syntax highlighting
- Highlight all occurrences
- Parenthesis auto-complete
- Context-aware ordinary text auto-complete
- Multiple-selection editing support
- Code snippets
- grep support
- bash shell integration
- Color schemes support

Requirements

Gnome version of Vim 7.3+ compiled with python support amongst other standard features like clientserver, conceal, ctags and alike.
Python 2.x+
GNU Make
GNU GCC
GNU G++
Git
libclang.so
Internet connection

In debian-based distributions, one may install the requirements by running:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential vim-gnome python2.7 git libclang-dev

Installation

Default installation path is set to /opt/yavide. To use different installation directory, provide it as a command line argument to install.sh script.

cd ~/ && git clone https://github.com/JBakamovic/yavide.git
cd yavide && ./install.sh <install_directory>

if <install_directory> is empty, installation path will be set to /opt/yavide
if <install_directory> is not empty, installation path will be set to <install_directory>/yavide

sudo rm -R ~/yavide

If you experience any installation issues be sure to consult the FAQ section first.

Usage overview

Category	Shortcut	Description
Project management

                              | `<Ctrl-s>n`	                      | Create new project
                              | `<Ctrl-s>i`                       | Import project with already existing code base
                              | `<Ctrl-s>o`                       | Open project
                              | `<Ctrl-s>c`                       | Close project
                              | `<Ctrl-s>s`                       | Save project
                              | `<Ctrl-s>d`                       | Delete project

Screenshots

More details ...

Credits

This is an alphabetically ordered list of third-party Vim plugins currently utilized in the system:

A (https://github.com/vim-scripts/a.vim)
Clang_complete (https://github.com/Rip-Rip/clang_complete)
NERDTree (https://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree)
NERDCommenter (https://github.com/scrooloose/nerdcommenter)
SuperTab (https://github.com/ervandew/supertab)
Tagbar (https://github.com/majutsushi/tagbar)
vim-airline (https://github.com/bling/vim-airline)
UltiSnips (https://github.com/SirVer/ultisnips)
vim-autoclose (https://github.com/Townk/vim-autoclose)
vim-fugitive (https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive)
vim-gitgutter (https://github.com/airblade/vim-gitgutter)
vim-multiple-cursors (https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors)
vim-pathogen (https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen)

FAQ

Installation process does not complete all the steps successfully.

Issues can arise when some required packages, like libpcre3, are named differently or not even present in your distribution repository. Identify these packages and install them manually.

Class browser does not show any symbols.

Check if exuberant-ctags have been correctly installed on the system.

Source code auto-complete does not work.

Check if libclang has been installed on the system.
Check if path to the libclang.so has been set properly in .user_settings.vimrc.
Check if .clang_complete contains valid entries (include directories) for your project.

braneed/yavide

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