RE: Improving Emacs for writing code

[klaus.berndl]

Nick Roberts wrote:
>  > Here it is: http://ecb.sourceforge.net/cvs_snapshots/ecb.tar.gz
> 
> I realise that I should check for myself, but to save me time, does
> it use tree-widget.el for displaying tree structures or does it have
> it's own 
> lisp functions?

no, it has it's own tree-library tree-buffer.el which offers as well
as tree-widget.el powerful ascii- and graphical tree-displays...
But i have to admit, the main reason why ECB uses its own tree-library
is cause of historical reasons, i.e. ECB exists long before tree-widget.el
comes up... and it's too much effort to rewrite ECB with tree-widget.el
and IMHO it's not worth the effort...

> 
> The reason I ask is that I currently use the speedbar to display watch
> expressions as a tree-like structure in a Gdb session in Emacs
> (gdb-ui.el) and it's not really suitable.  I want to use more than
> window and the use of a timer in the speedbar makes updating awkward
> at times. 
> 
> Also if other things like CEDET are going to be merged into Emacs and
> they use the speedbar, I may have to undo any damage that I have done
> to it getting 
> it to work for watch expressions, so an alternative mechanism would
> be useful. 
> 
> I'm not very familiar with ECB but perhaps it could work with
> gdb-ui.el in a manner similar to Eclipse: ECB being one
> 'perspective', gdb-ui another, 

Yes, this would be possible - ECB more or less is just a 'displayor' or
layout-engine which can display any stuff like parsing-informations from
CEDET or also debugging stuff from gdb... but i do not know gdb-ui.el to
give an exact answer... but to give another example: ECB works very well with
screen/window-managers like escreen.el or winring.el... maybe this helps
you a little bit to better judge the interaction between ECB and gdb-ui.el...

Klaus