The purpose of this repository is to provide high level instructions for a class leader to set up a modern cpp IDE on stuudent computers that is both free and runs on Windows. This is a written version for window Baris Yuksel's excellent videos.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTUE03LnaXA
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_HW0EB67eY
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib914gNr0ys
Windows is terrible. Proprietary software is worse. This project should be viewed through the lens of 'harm reduction programs.' The best thing by far is to implore students to get off windows like they were getting off of Heroin.
However most Computer Science students (girls as well as boys) come to us after a decade of gaming. Can I play Halo if I switch to Ubuntu? Is there a version of Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty for Debian? Explaining the virtues of Free Software has not worked for me. I even showed students Richard Stallman's excellent (and brief) TedX talk available at the url below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag1AKIl_2GM
The reactions I received were simmilar to exposing them to a Bernie Sander's rally. "That is a cool old dude. Am I going to change my life? No."
Visual Studio costs $800. Although one can use the AStyle plugin to write styled code. On our lab computers this was never installed, let alone configured.
To save money, many students use Bloodshed's Dev-C++. This has not been maintained for 10 years and there are more than 340 known unfixed bugs. See the url below for more detail.
http://clicktobegin.net/programming/why-you-shouldnt-use-dev-c/
If students will not leave proprietary software alone. I still want them to learn posix style command line driven development. Here is my zero cost and Free Solution. These are not self study directions for students. This requires using elisp to load packages and configure packages and python to run cpplint. This is directed at the grad student adjunct or instructor teaching them.
The hacker's editor. You can use if for 30 years. It is not really and editor. It is a REPL. The best way for windows users to get it is via:
http://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca/en/emacs/windows/
If you are a VIM afficianado, you can use Evil mode.
This has been operationalized in a python package (library) called cpplint that is freely available. Now Google's style guide is somewhat controversial in the C++ community. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7900238 for a critique of the guide ane the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOCElcMcFik for its philosophy. What is not in doubt is that successful projects adhere to a style. If you check out only one of these references watch, Greg Hartman-Kroah's "I Don't Want Your Code", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMeH7wqOwXA.
We install auto-complete with semantic parsing for a back end. We also make auto-complete aware of our compiler include files.
These instructions do not cover all possible scenarios. Emacs packages change version numbers and will need to be tweaked. Teachers should not expect children who are taking their first programming course to configure a system that requires two separate languages besides C++, elisp and python. If they can do this they should be taking a higher level course.
Students learn to be comortable on the command line and can add familiarity with many open source tools incrementally such as gdb and valgrind.
First install modified Emacs for windows from:
http://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca/en/emacs/windows/
Select all of the defaults. It has a one click installer. You will need this to modify the Windows PATH variable. The PATH is list of directories where the operating system searches for a program.
Second install Cygwin. Cygwin can be confusing. It only installs a base package on default and there is no repo management system. Instead, to additional packages, repeat the installation process with following difference. When you come to the screen below search for the new program and left-click skip to download the binary of that program. For our base install you should find g++, make, cmake and gdb.
Third, to make linux utitities available from any path, you should understand where Cygwin is installed. It is installed in C:/ not C:/Program Files. The binary versions of programs are in C:/Cygwin/bin which is what you need to add to the path. You can not permanenty modify the PATH variable from cmd shell in windows. You need to use the GUI. You can use version 3 of the Powershell but not every student will have that and the syntax is awkward.
Instead go to Control Panel which exists in every version of Windows since NT. Find or select Advanced System Settings and Select Environmental Variables. If given a choice you want System variable not for just the user. Find the PATH and copy the variable value to a file in emacs. I use pathscratch. Make a copy and add the path to cygwin at the end. Here is my modified windows path.
%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\
%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;c:\cygwin\bin
If you open a new cmd shell on windows
And here is the screen where you can change the environmental variable in Windows. In the next three images we display the Advanced System Variables, the Environmental Variables and finally the path selection. The path will normally extend far beyond the borders. My advice, is do not try to attempt to edit the path there but rather copy it to Emacs where adding the path to C:/Cygwin/bin is easy.
Click on environmental variables and the next screen appears:
You will have to scroll in the system variables to find the PATH variable.
Here are the tricks of Emacs and Windows CUA to successfully copy and edit the path.
- Find pathscratch in the usual way C-x C-f pathscratch.
- This brings up a blank file
- Go to the Edit System Variable
- Press C-a to select all of the variable value
- Press C-c to copy the value to the windows clipboard
- Put the cursor back in Emacs in the pathscratch file. C-y called yank to paste the variable back in Emacs.
- Notice that each place the path searches is separated by a semi-colon
- Make sure to put a semi-colon before new path.
- Add the C:/Cygwin/bin to the path in Emacs
- Click Ok on all of the winows.
- Close the old command window and open a new one.
- Linux utilities such as 'ls' now work in the command shell from any directory
We need python to use cpplint which will give us our styling. We also have to install setup tools, pip and virtualenv. First go to the main python site:
https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/
As of this writing the latest release in the 2.7.x series is 2.7.10. Select that release for windows. Depending on whether or not you have a 64 bit machine. For my Windows 10 Virtual machine, I only have to search system properties. See information below:
Click on the appropriate python:
This will install python in C:/Python27. We now need to go back to the Environmental variables and add c:/Python27 to the path in the same way as before.
Open a new cmd window. Type python. You should be taken into the python cmd interpreter. Type quit() and continue.
Run a cmd shell as administrator. Navigate to the python27 directory make a directory for scripts. Make a scripts directory if it does not exist. See the screenshot below:
you can then download the following two files:
https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
Copy these files to C:/Python27/Scripts. See the screen shot below:
You can then run them in the way shown below:
python ez_setup.py
python get-pip.py
pip install virtualenv
It is generally good practice to set up a virtual environment in Python. We then set up a virtual environment. I am going to suggest that we set up a virtualenv in user space.
cd c:/Users/evan/Documents
mkdir myVenv
cd myVenv
virtualenv lint
lint/Scripts/activate
The prompt should change and have a begin with '(lint)'. We can now install a python program to check our C++ style
pip install cpplint
Go get a glass of water. Everything else is in Emacs.
I am not sure if I should copy the text here verbatim or I should tell
the reader to take a second and read https://kb.iu.edu/d/aghb. It
explains the key strokes we will need to describe. Assuming you have
read it, Let's tye C x C f to find a new file and make sure it is in
your home directory. The line in the small space at the bottom of
Emacs called the mini-buffer should read:
~/.emacs
Now following the convention in https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit add marmalade to your .emacs file.
(require 'package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives '("marmalade" . "https://marmalade-repo.org/packages/"))
Now we can define some new packages and install them automatically.
(defvar my-packages '(semantic/sb iedit auto-complete auto-complete-config
auto-complete-c-headers flymake-google-cpplint
flymake-cursor google-c-style))
(package-initialize)
(dolist (p my-packages)
(when (not (package-installed-p p))
(package-install p)))
Next we add the configuration. You need to substitute your students windows user name where you see . The '<>' brackets are an indicator of a parameter and should not be included.
(global-ede-mode 1)
(require 'semantic/sb)
(semantic-mode 1)
(require 'iedit)
(require 'auto-complete)
(global-auto-complete-mode t)
(require 'auto-complete-config)
(add-to-list 'ac-dictionary-directories "C:/Users/<user>/.emacs.d/elpa/auto-complete-20150618.1949/dict")
(set-default 'ac-c-sources
'(ac-source-abbrev
ac-source-dictionary
ac-source-yasnippet
ac-source-words-in-buffer
ac-source-words-in-same-mode-buffers
ac-source-semantic))
(ac-config-default)
(defun my:add-semantic-to-autocomplete()
(add-to-list 'ac-sources 'ac-sources-semantic)
)
(add-hook 'c-mode-common-hook 'my:add-semantic-to-autocomplete)
(add-hook 'c++-mode-common-hook 'my:add-semantic-to-autocomplete)
In order to complete the headers for the student. You need to determine where they are located. Since we have loaded g++ from cygwin and changed our path we can execute the following at the command prompt:
gcc -xc++ -E -v -
Use the result to modify:
(defun my:ac-c-header-init ()
(require 'auto-complete-c-headers)
(add-to-list 'ac-sources 'ac-source-c-headers)
;; (add-to-list 'achead:include-directories '"/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.8/include")
(add-to-list 'achead:include-directories '"/usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-cygwin/4.9.3/include")
)
(add-hook 'c-mode-hook 'my:ac-c-header-init)
(add-hook 'c++-mode-hook 'my:ac-c-header-init)
In the next function we use the operating system to set the command for executing cpplint each time we open a cpp file in Emacs. Unfortunately this is also path dependant so we use to indicate a parameter that needs to be changed.
(defun my:flymake-google-init()
(require 'flymake-google-cpplint)
(custom-set-variables
'(flymake-google-cpplint-command "c:/Users/evan/Documents/eip/lint/Scripts/cpplint.exe"))
(flymake-google-cpplint-load)
(require 'flymake-cursor)
)
(add-hook 'c-mode-hook 'my:flymake-google-init)
(add-hook 'c++-mode-hook 'my:flymake-google-init)
Next we add semantic as a backend to autocomplete. And declare a project in ede mode so that auto complete will even work on user defined
(defun my:add-semantic-to-autocomplete()
(add-to-list 'ac-sources 'ac-source-semantic)
)
(add-hook 'c-mode-common-hook 'my:add-semantic-to-autocomplete)
(add-hook 'c++-mode-common-hook 'my:add-semantic-to-autocomplete)
(global-ede-mode 1)
;; create a project for our program.
(ede-cpp-root-project "hash" :file "C:/Users/<user>/Documents/hash/src/main.cpp"
:include-path '("../my_inc"))
;; you can use system-include-path for setting up the system header file locations.
;; turn on automatic reparsing of open buffers in semantic
(global-semantic-idle-scheduler-mode 1)
The file also has to be changed but it will allow you test the set up.
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