Re: running EDE from a file that is not under a project root dir

[Stephen Leake]

David Engster <address@hidden> writes:

> Stephen Leake writes:
>> I have heard complaints that "emacs is not like other IDEs". So when I
>> see _every_ other IDE providing a single global project, it seems
>> obvious that Emacs should support that as well.
>
> The usual way I know is to load some sort of container which contains
> any number of projects. In Eclipse it's the 'workspace', in Visual
> Studio it's the 'solution'. Working with many projects at the same time
> and seamlessly switching between them is what I would consider to be the
> norm in other IDEs. Everything else would feel exotic to me.

Ok, it's been a (long) while since I used Eclipse or Visual *; last time
I did, there was only one active project. My recent experience is
Arduino (admittedly a very simple environment by design), Android
Studio, AdaCore GPS.

In Eclipse and Visual Studio with more than one project open, is the
"current project" deduced from the current file? If so how do they
handle the issue of project hierarchy that I raised?

I could see identifying the lowest-level project that contains the file
(ie, the C standard library project contains stdio.h). But that doesn't
give me the full search path, because I don't know which higher level
project the user is working on.

In Emacs Ada mode, the top level project is the current project; the lower
level projects are present as far as gprbuild is concerned, but the
Emacs code doesn't need to know about them. There are still many
top-level Ada projects that share lower-level code, so if more than one
top-level project was open, there would not be a one-to-one mapping from
file to project.

If Eclipse and Visual Studio are like that, so the collection of
projects contains only top level projects, then _if_ they have disjoint
file sets, you can get the project from a file. But that seems unlikely,
and highly use case dependent.

-- 
-- Stephe