In section Getting Started with the Cafu Source Code we have introduced you to working with the Cafu source code, but daily work is a lot more convenient if a text editor or IDE can automate the most frequent tasks.

Besides normal text editor functionality, what we most importantly need is:

• Starting the build (SCons) with a single press of a key or button.
• A click on a compiler error message must open the relevant source file at the reported position.
• Searching in all project files.

In this section we present several text editors and IDEs that achieve these goals (and more).

UltraEdit is a commercial, very powerful text editor. It is available for Windows, and in a slightly different edition also for Linux and MacOS. Personally, I do most of my development with UltraEdit, especially under Windows.

UltraEdit has excellent implementations for all of the above requirements: Setting up a “tool” (command-line scons -Q in the proper working directory, e.g. d:\dev\Cafu) is very easy, clicking in the output window to open files on error messages is trivial, and the implementation of Find and Replace is just awesome.

What I dislike about UltraEdit is that it is almost too powerful and too flexible, and that the Linux and Mac editions are not yet quite on par with the Windows release.

Geany is a lightweight, open-source text editor that, at least regarding the above features, is similar to UltraEdit. Geany is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS (and more).

I've only recently started to use it under Linux (using Geany 1.22), and my first impression is very good. Find and replace is not as convenient as in UltraEdit, but tool setup and many other basic features are quite the same.

Unfortunately, I have little experience with these IDEs, but generally, they work very much like the alternatives mentioned above: Please check out http://www.scons.org/wiki/IDEIntegration for details.